ERISA legally obligates the plan administrators to provide important facts regarding their retirement and health benefit plans. All participants are entitled to automatically receive an SPD, free of charge.
If a plan is changed, participants must be informed either through a revised summary plan description or in a separate document. This is called a summary of material modifications, which must also be given to participants free of charge.
The SPD tells participants:
For more information please visit the Department of Labor's page on this topic.
No, it is not required for you to reprocess them. However, you may wish to complete the flow in order to store a digital copy in your documents section.
If you choose to distribute SPD's through Zenefits, you will be prompt to download or distribute your completed SPD once the flow is finished. An email won't be sent to employees, however, they will see a pending item in the notifications center (displayed as red dot on the bell on the top-right corner of their dashboard) stating that their SPD is available in the Documents section of their account.
Most error messages come from the file name being too long, or the file being password protected. We have included some troubleshooting tips below.
Use Chrome to open the PDF file, then right click on file content, choose Print, then save as PDF. The new file should work with no error message.
If you continue to receive an error message, please reach out to our support team through our Contact Us page for further assistance.
If on the first day of the group's ERISA plan year (renewal), the company had 100 or more participants enrolled in coverage, then they will need to file a Form 5500 for their Health and Welfare Benefit plan. A group health plan with fewer than 100 employees that is either fully-insured or self-funded (or a combination of both) is generally not required to file Form 5500.
Zenefits does not file the plan with the Department of Labor, however, this can be done online.
For more information regarding filing the ERISA Form 5500, please see this Help Center article or visit this Department of Labor page.
Most error messages come from the above issues. Take the following steps to fix either of these errors.
1. Company administrators will receive an inbox task to complete their Summary Plan Description, or SPD, about 45 days after their renewal.
2. Clicking Get Started will take you into the overview of the SPD process.
3. Clicking Generate an SPD will take you to the first part of the SPD creation process. All you need to do on this page is confirm that all of the information is correct. Please also note that the contact information for your insurance carriers is provided as you may need this later on.
4. Clicking Confirm will take you to the next step, where you will need to enter some information about the plans offered by your company.
5. On this step, you'll see a draft of the first part of the SPD. Confirm that what you see is correct and click Next.
6. The final step of the SPD process is to upload policy booklets from your insurance carriers. You will use the blue Upload link to add the booklets to your SPD.
7. Clicking Next will take you to a page where you can view and download the completed SPD.
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