If there is one situation that I see consistently with plan providers landing in trouble, a good chunk of the time is when they put their needs ahead of the needs of their clients. The needs of the client should always come first and your needs come a distant second.

Recently, I came across a situation where the broker of a participant decided that working within a brokerage window wasn’t a plan, so they conspired with the participant to get an IRA distribution to an IRA on the broker’s platform while the participant was actively employed and way younger than age 59 ½. This situation put the participant and the participant’s employer, which will necessitate a voluntary compliance filing and likely early distribution penalty against the participant. The broker did what was best for them, and let us just say that it will bite them in the rear end.