Many retirement plan advisors ultimately build their most profitable relationships by managing participants' personal assets. I chose a different path. This post explains why I invoice my work, reject asset-based pricing, refuse rollover business, and believe every advisory practice begins by answering one question: Who is the client?

SECURE 2.0 contained more than 90 provisions and did not address the compensation architecture that determines whether plan sponsors can function as buyers of retirement plan services.

SECURE 3.0 is now in the early drafting stage. Here is a proposed one paragraph amendment to ERISA 408(b)(2), written as actual statutory text, requiring quarterly invoicing of all service provider compensation in dollar terms.

One paragraph added. Multiple provisions simplified or rendered redundant. Better information. Lower compliance burden.

PBM reform and retirement plan fee reform are usually treated as separate policy questions. Structurally, they are the same problem. Both markets have tried disclosure based reform. Neither has produced market discipline. The fix in both is to replace automatic collection with invoicing.

408(b)(2) was designed to give plan fiduciaries the information needed to evaluate what they pay for retirement plan services. Seventeen years of Form 5500 data show it has not worked. The reason is structural as the regulation is built on projections rather than actuals, percentages rather than dollars, and a one-time disclosure rather than a recurring moment of accountability. Quarterly invoicing replaces the broken mechanism with a superior one. One paragraph added to ERISA. Several provisions struck. A reasonable estimate of 50 to 60% reduction in compliance burden for service providers and 60 to 70% for plan sponsors. Better outcomes than the current system produces. Here is the provision by provision accounting.

The framework for identifying genuinely excessive retirement plan fees already exists. Daniel Aronowitz built it. Applied to small plan recordkeeping and advisory fees, where services are standardized and comparisons are reliable, it points to fee dispersion that warrants serious EBSA scrutiny.

Field Assistance Bulletin 2026-01 generated immediate and thorough commentary from the ERISA bar. Every major analysis was accurate, professional, and written entirely for large plan clients. The Am Law 100 firms that cover ERISA serve Fortune 500 companies and institutional fiduciaries — a narrow slice of a market with 836,000 plans in it. 91% of those plans have fewer than 100 participants. The two words in FAB 2026-01 most relevant to that market — loyalty and egregious — appeared in none of the published analysis in that context. This post explains what those words actually mean for the small plan market, why asset-based advisor compensation is a loyalty question and not merely a prudence question, and why the fidelity bond enforcement priority named in the FAB points directly at the plans the published commentary ignores.

Field Assistance Bulletin 2026-01 received substantial coverage when it was issued on April 14. Every published reaction focused on the shift away from ESOP enforcement, the loyalty-over-prudence priority, and the prohibition on regulating by enforcement. None of them noted the most significant detail in the document. To my knowledge, this is the first FAB in the 24-year history of the bulletin program to designate fidelity bond violations as a named enforcement priority with a specific completion timeline. That is not a technical footnote. It is a structural change in how EBSA intends to approach a requirement that has existed since 1974 and has rarely been systematically enforced. This post explains what changed, why it matters, and what plan sponsors should do about it.