The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC) is seeking to collect additional information from terminated plans participating in the agency’s missing participants program. The program is mandatory for PBGC-insured single-employer and multiemployer defined benefit (DB) plans and optional for defined contribution (DC) and small professional-service DB plans.

PBGC currently requests information from participating plans so the agency can search for missing participants and provide benefits to any who are found. To ensure proper tax withholding on benefit payments, PBGC intends to request two new pieces of information:

• For DC plans with Roth accounts, a breakdown of the qualified and nonqualified Roth amounts transferred to PBGC, and if nonqualified Roth amounts are transferred, the date of the first Roth contribution
• For DB and DC plans, identification of any portion of a participant’s benefit that’s treated as foreign-source income, and for DB plans only, how that portion was determined

PBGC’s expanded information request is currently awaiting authorization from the Office of Management and Budget. Comments are due by Jan. 7, 2021.

Related resources

• Notice of request for extension of OMB approval of information collection, with modifications (Federal Register, Dec. 8, 2020)
• Expanded missing participants program (PBGC, April 22, 2020)
• Missing participants program for PBGC-insured single-employer plans (PBGC, Dec. 6, 2019)