Articles Discussing Form 5500.

The Internal Revenue Service has broadened the filing and payment relief provided under prior guidance. IRS Notice 2020-23 postpones, among other relief, the due date for employee benefit plans required to make the Form 5500 series filings due on or after April 1, 2020, and before July 15, 2020.  Plans

Executive Summary: The Form 5500 is an annual report that must be filed for every employee benefit plan that covers 100 or more participants. For calendar year plans, these forms must be filed by July 31, 2017.

The IRS added new compliance questions to the 2015 IRS Form 5500/5500-SF, which is the annual report filed by retirement plans with the Department of Labor and the IRS. The Form 5500 instructions, however, specifically provide that plan sponsors should not complete these questions for the 2015 plan year filing. Last week, the IRS invited comments on several of the new questions. In its request for comments, the IRS has also proposed to modify some of the questions from their original form, or delete them entirely.

Over this past summer, the Surface Transportation and Veterans Health Care Choice Improvement Act of 2015 (the “Surface Transportation Act”) included a provision that extended by a month the automatic extension that is available to Form 5500-series filers, to be effective with the filing of the 2016 returns. (See our Legal Alert dated September 9, 2015.) Whether you appreciated it or not, that extension was short-lived, and has now been repealed before even taking effect.

On July 31, 2015, President Obama signed the “Surface Transportation and Veterans Health Care Choice Improvement Act of 2015” (P.L. 114-41) (the “Act”). The Act primarily served to extend the Highway Trust Fund and various related measures, but it also included a number of unrelated provisions, one of which was a revision in the rules relating to extensions for filing Forms 5500. (There were also changes made to the due dates of various other tax returns, but those changes are beyond the scope of this Alert; you may contact the author if you would like additional information regarding those changes as well.)

Executive Summary: The Form 5500 and Form 5500-EZ are annual reports that must be filed for every employee benefit plan that covers 100 or more participants. For calendar year plans, these forms must be filed by July 31, 2015.

Executive Summary: Administrators or sponsors of employee benefit plans subject to ERISA generally must file information regarding each benefit plan every year. This information is filed using Form 5500. For calendar year plans, these forms must be filed by July 31, 2014.

Executive Summary: The Form 5500, Annual Return/Report of Employee Benefit Plan, is used to report information concerning employee benefit plans and must be filed by the last day of the 7th calendar month after the end of the plan year, which is July 31, 2012 for calendar year plans.