Acknowledge Distributing Your 2018 SPDs and SMMs

March 1 was the deadline to distribute your cooperative’s 2018 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 documents to your employees and then acknowledge distribution on the Group Plan Documents page of the Employee Benefits website. Here are some hints to help:

• The Employee Benefits website includes a checklist to help you distribute and acknowledge your SPDs and SMMs.
• All of your co-op’s unacknowledged documents appear in the section titled “Documents Requiring Acknowledgement” at the top of the Group Plan Documents. Expand it to view them all.
• To acknowledge multiple SPDs 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 an SPD or SMM for a plan because it has no participants, fill in zero (0) on the form for the number of participants.
• Be prepared to provide the number of participants who are literate only in a non-English language. 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 2018 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.