NRECA Employee Benefits Weekly

Have You Acknowledged Distributing Your 2017 SPDs and SMMs?

Posted on Posted in Compliance, Group Benefits

March 1 was the deadline to distribute your cooperative’s 2017 Group Benefits Program summary plan description (SPD) and summary of material modifications (SMM) documents to plan participants.

If you haven’t already done so, please give these important notices to your employees right away, and then fill out the acknowledgement form. This year, you can download your documents and acknowledge distribution from the same location on the Employee Benefits website.

Every year, the final step in this important compliance task is filling out the Group Plan SPD and SMM Distribution and Acknowledgement form. You can acknowledge all your plans at the same time on one form. The Employee Benefits website is your comprehensive resource for this task, and includes a checklist to help you distribute your SPDs and fill out the acknowledgement form. Here are some important acknowledgement highlights:

  • Documents Requiring Acknowledgement is now the top section on the Group Plan Documents. All your co-op’s unacknowledged documents will appear in this section. Expand it to view them all. To acknowledge multiple SPD and SMMs that you distributed on the same date, click the “Select All” box in the top left corner of the document view panel, and then check or uncheck individual SPDs and SMMs accordingly. Click “Start” to begin the acknowledgement process. You will be prompted to enter the date distributed in Step 1 of the acknowledgement process.
  • If you didn’t distribute SPDs for one of your plans because it has no participants, fill in zero (0) on the form for the number of participants.
  • Don’t skip the Number of Participants Who Are Not Literate in English. This number is different from the Number of Participants Enrolled, which refers to all participants enrolled in the plan regardless of English literacy.
  • More details about the non-English language survey part of the acknowledgement form are available in the February 2017 archived issue of Benefits Bulletin.

If you have questions as you acknowledge distributing your SPDs and SMMs, contact the group compliance team at 866.673.2299, option 7, or email us at group.compliance@nreca.coop.

 

Scroll to top