On March 5, 2025, Retirement Clearinghouse (RCH) released a landmark whitepaper – Building Out Clearinghouse Services for the U.S. Retirement System: A Blueprint for a Digital Infrastructure.

As a co-author of the paper who has also spent a great deal of time chronicling the real‑world retirement savings challenges faced by America’s mobile workforce, I believe that this paper arrives not a moment too soon.

Similar to the missing participant problem, plan sponsors face significant uncertainties when navigating the issue of uncashed distribution checks. On one hand, regulators increasingly view the existence of uncashed checks as a sign of fiduciary weakness – a red flag indicating that participants may not be receiving the benefits they are owed. On the other hand, plan sponsors must operate within a complex regulatory environment that provides limited direct guidance on how to handle these situations when they occur.

In this environment, it is vitally important that each retirement plan maintain a formal, documented and defensible uncashed distribution check policy – one that outlines the plan’s procedures, establishes consistent practices and mitigates fiduciary risk.

October has been a phenomenal month for auto portability, with plan sponsor adoption surging and industry thought leaders increasingly recognizing the promise of auto portability in finally solving longstanding 401(k) system portability issues.

The preservation of small-balance 401(k) accounts – particularly those under $7,000 and subject to 401(k) plans’ automatic rollover provisions – represents an important challenge for America’s retirement system.

When job-changing workers cash out or abandon these accounts in dead-end safe harbor IRAs, they lose not just immediate savings, but can forego decades of compounded growth – reducing their odds of a comfortable or timely retirement.

Sometimes it seems, the universe sends you a signal that you haven’t been wasting your time.

For me, one such signal arrived in the form of a June 2nd, 2025 opinion piece by PensionBee executive Helene O’Brien, as well as industry reporting on comments from CEO Romi Savova, both drawing attention to the participant-unfriendly nature of some safe harbor IRAs, which house the forced-out retirement savings of separated participants with balances less than $7,000.

April 22 marks the 55th Earth Day, a time to reflect on our relationship with the environment and the progress made in reducing waste through recycling. While society has made strides in curbing physical waste, a similar problem persists in the U.S. retirement system: the inefficient handling of 401(k) accounts when employees change jobs.

If you’re a defined contribution plan sponsor struggling with uncashed distribution checks, it can feel you’re on a never-ending treadmill.

Auto portability, delivered via the Portability Services Network (PSN), is revolutionizing retirement savings preservation by addressing the critical challenges of cashout leakage and account fragmentation.
 

Auto portability will deliver broad-based benefits to America’s workforce, but research has shown that the new feature disproportionately benefits under-saved and underserved demographic segments, including minorities, women, lower-income and younger workers.

Recently, we’ve read – mainly via paid promotions – about the existence of so-called “world-class” automatic rollover IRA services, which seem to be little more than old-school, traditional automatic rollover IRAs laying claim to unspecified, premium features.