Legal

Callahan Financial, Richard Bernstein and other registered investment advisors made untrue or unsubstantiated claims or lacked required disclosures, according to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The IBM lawsuit caught the attention of Labor Department, which claims the three-year deadline to bring a fiduciary claim doesn't apply because workers didn't have "actual knowledge" of the ERISA violation.

It's critical that employers and their benefits advisors take the fiduciary standards learned from retirement plans and apply them to their health plans.

Recently, numerous class action 401(k) lawsuits have been filed by participants over misuse of forfeited assets from former employees, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Nordstrom.

Companies need to fully understand what the plan fees are so they can be "fully transparent" with their workers, said law firm Schlichter Bogard, which is representing plaintiffs suing TIAA for steering them into high-fee investments.

The firm mismanages its $3.4 billion 401(k) plan by overpaying for administrative services and using money forfeited by former employees, the class action lawsuit alleges.