Stealing a line from Chris Rock, I once joked while working at a third-party administrator (TPA) that if you wanted to hide something from one of our inexperienced plan administrators, you should hide it in the plan document file.

So many TPA errors can be avoided if the TPA knows what’s in a client’s plan document. I use Relius’ volume submitter documents and one of the great things is a plan index file, which spits out a one-page summary of the plan document terms and which page in the plan document to find it. I’m sure other plan document drafters have the same type of index. Yet errors by plan sponsors and TPAs based on no review of the plan document are still a thing. Read the plan document because as the old Ed Asner RIF commercials, reading is fundamental.