With the transition to Empower we will have access to a much more robust recordkeeping platform that give us the ability to better administer all Plan provisions, including eligibility. Our current setup with TIAA does not allow for these options and we rely on our locations to manage this information manually (resulting in a very high error rate and expensive corrections). The Empower platform provides us tools to manage this process much more effectively and reduce or eliminate the errors.
Once we transfer to Empower, we will be entering the hours worked for ALL W2 employees, not just those that qualify for the employER contribution. Our Plan is different from most in that ALL W2 employees are eligible to participate by making pretax elective contributions from the first date of hire, whether or not they are eligible for the employER contribution. (You can view the Retirement Plan Document here). W2 employees can choose to begin, change, stop or decline to make pretax employee elective contributions (salary deferrals) at any time during their employment at one of our participating employers.
In addition, because someone has to work 12 months AND 1000 hours (or have completed a ministerial internship, or have previously qualified at a previous employer), we need to know the hours worked of ALL W2 employees, regardless if contributions are submitted for them or not, so that we can track eligibility. We will be notified from Empower when an employee has satisfied the Year of Eligibility Service (YOES) and when they must start receiving the employER contribution, again, regardless if they make employee elective contributions or not.
This process will also catch those employees that work at more than one of our participating employers (this is a growing number of employees). Hours are counted across all participating employers to track eligibility and now we'll be able to accurately track that.