Perhaps in an effort to clear up some confusion, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has updated its website with more detailed instructions on which compliance questions on the 2015 Form 5500 series shouldn’t be answered.
The Internal Revenue Service recently said retirement plan sponsors shouldn’t complete the compliance questions on the 2015 Forms 5500 and 5500-SF, and related schedules, because they weren’t approved by the Office of Management and Budget before the forms were published, but didn’t go into specifics as to which questions sponsors could ignore (33 PBD, 2/19/16).
On February 29, the IRS announced in the latest edition of its “Employee Plans News” that plan sponsors should ignore the following questions:
- Form 5500 – Preparer information at the bottom of page 1;
- Schedule H – Lines 4o-p, 6a-d;
- Schedule I – Lines 4o-p, 6a-d;
- Schedule R – New Part VII, lines 20a-c, 21a-b, 22a-d, and 23; and
- Form 5500-SF – Preparer information at the bottom of page 1, lines 10j, 14a-d, and new Part IX, lines
15a-c, 16a-b, 17a-d, 18, 19, and 20.
