Benefits & ERISA Law

On Named and Functional Fiduciaries

I have been a fan of Scott Simon's Morningstar articles on the various fiduciary relationships among those who run plans and those who advise them. This one here is a good, practical, business oriented view of the different forms of fiduciaries - named and functional (or deemed) - in 401(k) and other plans. It is written more from the business perspective, of who are the different players and what fiduciary niches do they occupy, in the structuring and operation of a plan. This is somewhat different than how we lawyers, particularly litigators, tend to look at these issues, because it is forward facing and addresses the deliberate structuring of the plan and of these roles. We litigators in particular tend to look at things from a different vantage, more in hindsight, and say did this person or that entity, looking at what they actually did, acquire the status of a fiduciary for purposes of liability exposure, whether they were intended to be put in that position or not at the outset of the plan's establishment. And from that perspective, one of the most useful comments in his most current article is his explanation of one type of functional fiduciary, namely the party that assumed control over plan assets to some extent unintentionally, but that nonetheless then became a fiduciary with fiduciary responsibility for any acts taken in that regard. As he points out, that party assumes fiduciary liability in that situation, even if it did not knowingly cross the line into that role. As Simon Says:

A more serious scenario is where a person unilaterally exercises discretionary control or authority over a plan without express authorization. Such a person can become a "functional" 3(21) limited scope/non-named fiduciary--without a written contract--through its mere conduct of providing unauthorized advice or exercising unauthorized control or discretion. Given that no contract is present in this situation, the entity obviously doesn't intend to become a 3(21) limited scope/non-named fiduciary but becomes so anyway through its inadvertent conduct.

From a litigation perspective, this is a far more common circumstance than one might assume, and is a central point in much breach of fiduciary litigation, where a key question is often whether a particular defendant became a fiduciary by its actions concerning the plan and its assets, where it was not intended by the plan's authors and founders to be a fiduciary.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on June 04, 2010 (boomark / email).