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Remember the Changes to 2014 Forms 5500

Plans with calendar year plan years — and that’s most of them — must file their 2014 Forms 5500 by this July 31. So the reminder the IRS included in its latest issue of Employee Plans News concerning the changes to the Form 5500 and its schedules for 2014 reporting is particularly timely.

The changes to the Form 5500 for 2014 reporting are as follows:

Form 5500

  • Line A, multiple-employer plans, is updated. If selected, a filer must include an attachment listing information for each participating employer along with a good faith estimate of each participating employer’s share of the total contributions for the year.

  • Line 6a(1), “Total number of active participants at the beginning of the plan year,” is new for 2014.

Form 5500-SF

  • Line A is updated to include more information on multiple-employer plans and to add an option for foreign plans.

  • Lines 5d(1), “Total number of active participants at the beginning of the plan year,” and 5d(2), “Total number of participants at the end of the plan year,” are new for 2014.

  • On Line 5e, filers must now provide the number of participants that terminated employment during the plan year with accrued benefits that were not fully vested.

Form 5500 Schedule H — Line 1c (13), Form 5500 instructions, is enhanced to set out what an investment company registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 is.

Form 5500 Schedule MB — Line 4 is new and requires plans in critical status to provide information about the plan year in which a plan is projected to emerge from critical status or, if the rehabilitation plan is based on forestalling possible insolvency, the plan year in which insolvency is expected.

Form 5500 Schedule SB

  • Line 3 is updated to report the vested and total funding targets separately for each type of participant.

  • Line 11b is split into Line 11b(1), the calculation based on the prior year’s effective interest rate, and Line 11b(2), the calculation based on the prior year’s actual return.

  • Line 15 instructions are modified for situations in which the AFTAP was not certified for the plan year.

  • Line 27 is modified to reflect funding changes under the Cooperative and Small Employer Charity Pension Flexibility Act of 2014 for affected defined benefit plans.

The IRS also reminds filers that EFAST will allow submission of complete electronic returns for the current and three prior plan years. Therefore, any Form 5500 filings for plan years before 2011 filed after Jan. 1, 2015, must be submitted on 2014 forms. Filers availing themselves of this option must attach correct-year Schedules B, SB, MB, E, P, R, and T to their electronic filing as PDF images tagged as “Other Attachments.”