Privacy Policy

Last updated: December 2025

This Privacy Policy explains how information is handled when you visit paulsippil.com (the “Website”). The Website is informational and explanatory in nature and does not collect Personal Data directly from visitors.

By using the Website, you agree to the practices described in this Privacy Policy.

Interpretation and Definitions

Interpretation

Company refers to Paul Sippil, operating as Paul Sippil and Associates LLC, located in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Country refers to the United States.

Device means any device capable of accessing the Website, including a computer, phone, or tablet.

Personal Data means information that identifies or could reasonably identify an individual.

Usage Data means limited, non-identifying information automatically collected when accessing the Website.

Website refers to https://paulsippil.com.

You means the individual accessing the Website.

Collecting and Using Your Personal Data

Personal Data
The Website does not collect Personal Data directly. Users cannot create accounts, submit forms, or provide personal information through the Website.

Any personal information shared with the Company occurs only through off-site, voluntary communication initiated by the user (such as email) and is not collected through the Website itself.

Usage Data
The Website may collect limited, non-identifying Usage Data automatically through standard web technologies, including anonymized or aggregated analytics data such as pages visited, device type, and general traffic patterns. This data does not identify individual users.

Cookies & Analytics

The Website uses Google Analytics solely to understand general website traffic and performance. Google Analytics is configured for non-advertising, non-remarketing, and non-profiling purposes and collects aggregated, non-identifying usage data only.

Where possible, analytics are configured to minimize data collection. Users may control cookies through their browser settings.

Use of Information

Because the Website does not collect Personal Data, Personal Data is not used for marketing, advertising, profiling, or account management.

Any personal information shared through direct communication outside the Website is used solely to respond to the inquiry and is not sold or shared.

Sharing Information

The Company does not sell, rent, or trade Personal Data. Information shared through direct communication is not disclosed to third parties except where required by law.

Data Retention

The Website does not retain Personal Data related to Website use. Any personal information shared voluntarily through off-site communication is retained only as long as reasonably necessary to respond to the inquiry or comply with legal obligations.

Data Transfers

If you choose to contact the Company directly, your information may be processed or stored in the United States. Reasonable safeguards are used to protect such information.

Your Rights

Depending on your location, you may have rights to request access to, correction of, or deletion of personal information you have shared directly with the Company, and to opt out of future communications.

Do Not Track Signals

The Website does not respond to Do Not Track browser signals. You may manage cookies through your browser controls.

Children’s Privacy

The Website is not intended for children under the age of 13, and no information is knowingly collected from minors.

Link to Other Websites

The Website may contain links to third-party websites. The Company is not responsible for the content or privacy practices of those sites.

California Privacy Rights

California residents may have additional rights under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and related laws.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy may be updated periodically. Updates will be posted on this page with a revised date.

Contact Information

For questions or privacy-related requests:
Email: psippil@paulsippil.com

Plan administrators often spend more time and provide far more value than advisors. They perform compliance testing, plan design work, nondiscrimination analysis, document maintenance, and ongoing operational support. In many plans, administrators spend more time, apply more specialized expertise, and deliver more tangible output than the advisor—yet receive a fraction of the compensation. In many small and mid-sized plans, administrators may receive a modest flat fee, while advisors collecting asset-based fees that are several multiples more than the administration fee despite performing less specialized and less time-intensive work. It’s not unusual to see administration billed as a few thousand dollars per year while an advisor collecting 0.50%–1.00% of assets earns tens of thousands—even when the plan has a static, participant-directed lineup.

In a buyer-driven market, administrators would naturally question excessive advisor fees. They are often best positioned to observe the mismatch between work performed and compensation received.

But administrators rarely act as watchdogs because many depend on advisors for referrals. Challenging advisor compensation risks disrupting their own business pipeline. As a result, the very parties most capable of identifying excess fees are structurally disincentivized from speaking up.

This silence is not merely cultural; it reflects a structural contradiction. Excessive advisor compensation is a recognized fiduciary risk under ERISA, yet it is routinely excluded from the very compliance processes designed to surface fiduciary failure. Third-party administrators regularly identify operational and compliance issues—testing errors, document defects, procedural violations—yet often remain silent on advisor compensation, even when it is clearly misaligned with services performed. This omission does not reflect a lack of relevance or awareness. It reflects the reality that administrators derive much of their business from advisor referrals. The result is a system tasked with identifying fiduciary risk that systematically excludes one of the most common fiduciary risks from routine scrutiny.

I once had a conversation with a third-party administrator that illustrates this dynamic perfectly. He emphasized how important it often is for fees to be paid at the employer level, both for tax efficiency and accountability. Yet in the same breath, he explained that he rarely gets involved in advisor compensation or how those fees are paid unless the sponsor explicitly asks. This is not because the issue is unimportant, but because administrators derive most of their business from advisors. Challenging advisor compensation—even when misaligned—creates friction with the very relationships that sustain their practice. The result is a quiet contradiction: the professionals most capable of identifying irrational pricing are structurally disincentivized from raising it.

Recordkeepers operate under similar incentives. In many cases, advisors directly control or heavily influence which recordkeeping platform a plan uses; in others, administrators serve as the gateway. As a result, recordkeepers compete for advisor relationships rather than employer relationships—an inversion of normal market incentives in which the party selecting the service is not the party bearing the cost. Recordkeepers therefore have limited incentive to challenge advisor compensation structures, even when fees are clearly misaligned with services.

The result is a cascading silence. Administrators don’t push back on advisors. Recordkeepers don’t push back on administrators or advisors. Each intermediary depends on the others for distribution. Excess pricing survives not because it is justified, but because no participant in the chain has both the incentive and the authority to challenge it. When distribution partners are the real ‘customers,’ pricing gets optimized for intermediaries—not for the people paying the bill. Even among advisors—who might appear best positioned to challenge excessive fees—structural incentives often prevent meaningful engagement. When advisors are compensated as a percentage of assets, embedded in distribution relationships, or constrained by broker-dealer affiliations that steer them toward “approved” recordkeepers and administrators, fee opacity becomes self-reinforcing rather than something to be corrected.

Each failure persists even when the prior one is addressed, which is why disclosure, benchmarking, fiduciary process, and fee reductions have failed to produce market discipline.

It is also important to distinguish fiduciary obligation from structural silence. In most plans, administrators are not acting as discretionary fiduciaries under ERISA Section 3(16), and therefore are not legally required to police advisory compensation. But that distinction does not resolve the underlying failure. Administrators routinely see advisor fees, plan complexity, participant counts, and actual service activity, and are often acutely aware when advisory compensation bears little relationship to the work being performed. In a market with meaningful price signals, that information would naturally trigger scrutiny, discussion, or competitive pressure. In the retirement plan system, it rarely does. The reason is not legal prohibition, but incentive alignment: administrators depend heavily on advisors for referrals, and challenging advisor compensation risks disrupting those relationships. As a result, even when excessive fees are visible to knowledgeable professionals, the system provides no incentive to surface or correct them. This silence reflects not a compliance gap, but the absence of a market, rooted in a system that displaced buyers and suppressed price signals from inception.

What follows are not additional core failures, but the mechanisms through which those failures are reinforced, normalized, and protected over time.

How Advisor Revenue Models Reinforce These Failures

A further constraint exists at the advisor level that is rarely acknowledged. Many advisors who “handle” retirement plans do so only incidentally, often managing a small number of plans not as a primary professional focus, but as a pathway to participant-level asset management. Under this model, the retirement plan itself is not the core economic product; it is a distribution channel.

This incentive structure distorts not only how plans are serviced, but how plan infrastructure is selected. Financial advisors are often incentivized to recommend asset-based recordkeeping platforms rather than flat-fee providers—particularly those that also perform administration—because flat-fee pricing makes total plan costs explicit. When a recordkeeper charges a transparent per-participant or fixed dollar fee, it invites comparison, and that comparison does not stop at the recordkeeper. It extends directly to the advisor’s own compensation. Recommending a low-cost, flat-fee platform can therefore expose whether an advisor’s asset-based fee is proportional to the services actually provided. As a result, advisors may avoid platforms that increase price clarity—not because those platforms are inferior, but because transparency itself threatens the sustainability of asset-based compensation. In this way, infrastructure selection becomes a defensive pricing strategy, and opacity is preserved not by accident, but by incentive.

The downstream effect is predictable. Plan-level pricing, service alignment, and operational rigor become structurally under-prioritized. Advisors may be independent and well-intentioned, yet have little financial or professional motivation to invest deeply in plan design, fee analysis, or ongoing plan oversight—because that work does not drive their revenue.

This helps explain why retirement plans are often minimally serviced even in the absence of overt conflicts or institutional censorship. When no party is economically rewarded for treating the plan itself as the primary engagement, sustained scrutiny fails to develop, and excessive or outdated arrangements persist by default rather than design.

Platform Design as a Defensive Pricing Strategy

Once advisors are economically rewarded for opacity, they predictably steer plans toward platforms that preserve it, so the incentive shapes not only pricing, but which recordkeepers win distribution. In a free market with real price discovery, reduced functionality would exert downward pressure on price. In the retirement plan market, the opposite routinely occurs. Recordkeeping platforms with more restricted investment menus, fewer customization options, and eliminated features often charge more—not less—than platforms offering open architecture, broader fund access, and ETFs. John Hancock, for example, not only doesn’t have an open architecture platform, but doesn’t even allow for a participant-directed brokerage account, which allows participants unlimited access to investments on a custodian’s platform. All else equal, these limitations should lower cost. Often, they don’t. This inversion reveals that pricing is not determined by features or participant value, but by how effectively a platform preserves asset-based compensation. Flat-fee, open-architecture platforms make total plan costs explicit and invite comparison—not only of the recordkeeper, but of the advisor’s own fee. As a result, infrastructure selection itself becomes a defensive pricing strategy: platforms that increase price clarity threaten asset-based compensation, while opaque, asset-based platforms protect it. In a free market, fewer choices would cost less. In the retirement plan market, fewer choices protect pricing.

It is important to note that not all recordkeepers are built the same way. Some flat-fee providers operate on simpler technology stacks and narrower service models, enabling lower and more transparent pricing. Large national recordkeepers, by contrast, support complex legacy systems, extensive participant-facing technology, and broad service infrastructures that carry higher fixed costs. These platforms may legitimately cost more to operate. But that reality strengthens—rather than weakens—the case for transparent pricing. In a functioning market, higher costs must be justified explicitly and compared meaningfully against alternatives. When pricing is obscured through asset-based fees and bundled compensation, sponsors are denied the ability to evaluate whether higher-cost platforms are worth the premium—or whether they are paying for complexity they do not need.

A Concrete Example: The ABA Retirement Funds Brokerage “Escape Hatch”

One of the clearest examples is the ABA Retirement Funds program used by many law firms. The program includes a brokerage option that, once elected, allows participants to place most of their balance outside the core fund lineup, subject to maintaining a modest required amount (for example, $2,500) in the core funds. In practice, this structure can materially reduce the embedded layers that typically fund the distribution system: revenue sharing in the core lineup, recordkeeping and administrative charges built into the default platform, and asset-based advisory fees deducted automatically from participant accounts.

The point is not that every fee disappears in every case. Rather, the largest recurring fee layers become optional for participants who choose to opt out of the default fee plumbing. The exact impact varies by plan design, brokerage window rules, and the fee schedules of the recordkeeper and custodian. The key point is that when a legally available mechanism can materially reduce embedded fee layers, a functioning market would make that option widely known and routinely evaluated.

As the fifteen-year Chicago law firm case study demonstrates, even when such a mechanism exists continuously and legally, it can remain unused for more than a decade in the absence of invoicing, buyer incentives, or corrective pressure.

For high-balance law firm participants, the fee impact can be enormous—especially in plans with significant assets and ongoing contributions where total annual expenses can reach tens of thousands of dollars. In a functioning market, a legally available mechanism capable of collapsing most recurring plan fees would be widely understood and actively discussed. In the retirement plan market, however, it is rarely highlighted or utilized—not because it lacks relevance, but because widespread adoption would force advisors to justify compensation directly or negotiate explicit agreements, rather than collecting an automatic percentage from every participant regardless of whether their services are used.

A Fifteen-Year Case Study in Structurally Suppressed Price Discovery

What follows will serve as a reference point throughout this analysis—a longitudinal control case showing how the retirement plan system behaves when no unusual errors occur and no corrective pressure is applied.

To illustrate how extreme fee-reduction opportunities remain systematically unused, consider one Chicago law firm participating in the ABA Retirement Funds program. Nothing about this firm was operationally unusual: it was small, professionally managed, and legally permitted to reduce fees throughout the entire period.

From 2009 through 2024, this firm’s plan assets grew from approximately $4.3 million to nearly $11 million, while the number of active participants declined from a peak of 21 to 14. Over the same period, “other plan expenses” rose from $4,347 annually to $57,900. While “other plan expenses” can include multiple categories, that caveat does not weaken the conclusion—the scale, persistence, and direction of the increase are the point: costs rose dramatically even as participation fell and the plan remained small enough that communication and oversight should have been trivial.

On a per-participant basis, costs escalated from $256 per participant in 2009 to $4,136 per participant in 2024 — a sixteen-fold increase, despite fewer participants and no significant corresponding increase in plan complexity or documented service intensity.

Throughout this entire period, participants could have legally eliminated most recordkeeping, administrative, custodial, and advisory fees by electing the plan’s self-directed brokerage account option, subject only to maintaining a modest balance in the core fund lineup. Communication would have been trivial: the plan never had more than 21 participants and often had far fewer.

Had participants elected this option, the majority of embedded fees would have disappeared. Only a limited portion of administration costs and any explicitly negotiated advisory fee would have remained — and those remaining fees would almost certainly have been far lower had they been billed directly to the employer rather than extracted automatically from participant accounts year after year.

In a functioning market, a legally available mechanism capable of reducing participant costs by thousands of dollars per year — particularly in a small, sophisticated professional firm — would be widely known, routinely evaluated, and actively discussed. That this option remained effectively invisible for more than a decade is a predictable outcome of the incentive structure. It reflects a system in which price discovery is actively suppressed because widespread adoption would collapse asset-based compensation models that depend on automatic, universal fee extraction.

This is not an outlier. It is a case study in how the absence of invoicing—combined with aligned intermediary incentives—prevents even the most obvious cost-elimination opportunities from being surfaced, let alone acted upon.

If transparency does not restore market discipline, and awareness does not produce action, then the failure is not informational or psychological alone. It is institutional. Markets require participants whose incentives are aligned with scrutiny. That role does not currently exist in the retirement plan system. In the absence of such a role, even extreme and legally avoidable costs can persist indefinitely without challenge.

Why the Buyer Still Doesn’t Behave Like a Buyer

The Failure of Price Discovery Requires a New Professional Category

This incentive-driven breakdown in scrutiny completes the picture illustrated by the fifteen-year Chicago law firm case study: in a system built without a buyer, without invoices, and without exit, no recognized, buyer-aligned professional role could ever emerge to reconstruct total plan cost, test it against work performed, or impose economic accountability.

Price discipline normally emerges because markets support a robust supply of specialists whose incentives are aligned with the buyer: auditors, cost accountants, procurement professionals, independent reviewers, and consultants who are paid directly to evaluate value.

This absence of scrutiny is especially revealing where extreme fee-reduction opportunities exist but remain almost entirely unknown. In certain plan structures, participants can legally eliminate most recordkeeping, administrative, custodial, and advisory fees through brokerage account usage—yet these options are rarely disclosed, rarely discussed, and rarely utilized.

In a free market, such cost-elimination mechanisms would be widely understood, particularly among high-balance participants. In the current system, they are effectively suppressed; their adoption would collapse asset-based compensation models that rely on automatic, plan-wide fee collection.

When participants can opt out of embedded fees entirely, advisors must justify their services directly—or negotiate separate agreements. The near-total absence of awareness around these structures is not accidental. It is further evidence that price discovery is not merely absent, but actively obstructed by incentive alignment across platforms, advisors, and intermediaries. I see the stakes most clearly in law firms: in my dataset of excessive-fee plans built from Form 5500 filings since 2009, law firms represent a large and recurring share of the worst cases.

A functioning market therefore requires not only transparent invoices, but a recognized professional discipline built around plan-level diagnostics—work that is paid for directly, independent of asset gathering, and explicitly focused on cost, scope, necessity, and accountability. Without that discipline, excessive arrangements will continue to persist by default, even when they are visible, because too few professionals are economically rewarded for making the plan itself the primary engagement.

These constraints extend even to advisors themselves. In many advisory firms, advisors are limited to a list of approved recordkeepers and administrators with whom the firm maintains institutional relationships. Criticizing those providers—even when the criticism is factual and publicly documented—can create internal conflicts. I encountered this directly earlier in my career. After referencing widely reported articles about excessive-fee lawsuits involving John Hancock, a provider with whom my firm had an approved relationship, I was told I could not make critical remarks about any firm the organization worked with. I was also instructed that I could no longer use Form 5500 filings as a prospecting or analytical tool, despite their being public regulatory documents, all in the name of “compliance.” The issue was not accuracy or tone; it was institutional risk management. Even truthful, evidence-based scrutiny became unacceptable once it conflicted with existing distribution relationships. This dynamic helps explain why excessive fees persist: the professionals best positioned to identify and explain them are often structurally discouraged—or explicitly prohibited—from doing so once scrutiny conflicts with existing distribution relationships. These outcomes are only possible in a system with no invoices, no routine oversight, and no natural stopping mechanism for excessive fees.

Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Interpretation and Definitions

Interpretation

Collecting and Using Your Personal Data

Cookies & Analytics

Use of Information

Sharing Information

Data Retention

Data Transfers

Your Rights

Do Not Track Signals

Children’s Privacy

Link to Other Websites

California Privacy Rights

Changes to this Privacy Policy

Contact Information

Failure #1: No Invoicing Means No Price Discovery:

Failure #2: Asset-Based Fees Detach Compensation From Work

Failure #3: Employer Behavior Still Doesn’t Shift When Fees Become Explicit

Failure #4: Why Transparency and Fee Reductions Still Don’t Create a Market

Failure #5: Institutional Silence and Referral Dependency Prevent Escalation

Why Asset-Based Compensation Bakes in Advice Bias

Why Revenue Sharing Would Not Exist in a Free Market

Final Thought:

Transparency Is the Prerequisite for Freedom