On August 3, 2022, the IRS published Notice 2022-33, which extends the deadlines for amending retirement plans and IRAs to reflect certain changes to the law made by the SECURE Act; the Bipartisan American Miners Act; and section 2203 (allowing waiver of 2020 required minimum distributions) of the CARES Act. Before the IRS released Notice 2022-33, retirement plans with a calendar year plan year and IRAs generally were required to amend their plan documents to reflect those law changes by December 31, 2022 (although governmental plans and collectively bargains plans were subject to a later deadline); now, that deadline generally is December 31, 2025. This new amendment deadline varies based on the type of retirement plan and the sponsor of such retirement plan. The table below shows the original and revised amendment adoption deadlines for IRAs and various types of retirement plans. Plan sponsors will notice that under Notice 2022-33, the amendment deadline for the applicable SECURE Act, Miners Act, and CARES Act provisions is the same. The IRS anticipates that this will allow plan sponsors to adopt a single amendment that covers all three pieces of legislation, as applicable.

One key thing for the retirement plan sponsors to remember is that if they operationally implemented any of the other retirement plan provisions from the CARES Act, such as allowing coronavirus-related distributions or increasing the amount that participants could borrow from a retirement plan during 2020 or extending the repayment due date of plan loans outstanding during 2020, the deadline to adopt an amendment reflecting a retirement plan’s implementation of those provisions has not been extended by Notice 2022-33. This means that sponsors of nongovernmental, calendar-year plans still have a December 31, 2022 deadline for those amendments.

The extended deadlines apply to both individually designed retirement plans and retirement plans using pre-approved plan documents. Notice 2022-33 does not provide any relief for retirement plans that are terminated before the extended deadline – those plans are still required to be amended for all law changes in connection with their termination. Nor did Notice 2022-33 extend the deadline for plan sponsors using pre-approved plan documents to adopt a cycle 3 restatement. If a plan sponsor failed to adopt a cycle 3 restatement by July 31, 2022, it may correct this error using the IRS Voluntary Correction Program (“VCP”).