Overview
Lowell Walters helps employers minimize risks while offering meaningful benefits to employees. He minimizes risks by addressing Internal Revenue Code and ERISA issues facing employee benefit plans, including reviewing documents and provider contracts to point out “problem areas”; addressing concerns raised by the employer or another advisor; assisting with the fiduciary obligations of hiring service providers (through RFPs or otherwise); and representing employers whose plans are being investigated or audited by the Department of Labor or Internal Revenue Service. Lowell also works with companies and executives to devise bonus, stock bonus, and benefit programs geared toward executive-level employees. He helps employers offer meaningful benefits using his skills in plan design and his ability to work as a team with other service providers who implement portions of the plan.
Lowell understands that hiring the right advisor or consultant to select the appropriate investments and investment platform is a critical decision for a plan sponsor. He draws on his experience in the advisor search and selection process to help his clients select the advisor who brings value to participants while mitigating plan sponsor risk. This can involve developing and overseeing the entire advisor selection process, or assisting with a portion, such as establishing a pool of qualified investment consultants from which to choose or developing interview questions to differentiate the advisors. Lowell also provides this service with respect to the selection of retirement plan auditors and health insurance consultants.
Lowell’s rich background with private companies, nonprofits, and governmental entities and the differences in the application of ERISA and Internal Revenue Code to plans sponsored by those distinct groups makes him particularly qualified to work with plan sponsors such as hospitals, colleges, and universities, which can fall under any of those umbrellas and which tend to have diverse compensation structures and employee classifications.
Lowell takes pride in communicating complex issues understandably and offering practical solutions. When clients have questions, he addresses the questions asked, the questions that should have been asked, and the follow-up questions that are likely to arise.
Lowell married his college sweetheart and has two wonderful children. He strives to balance his devotion to his family with his devotion to his clients.
Featured Insights
Experience
Representative Examples
- Defended an employer from an IRS assessment of about $140,000 for allegedly failing to fulfill its Affordable Care Act obligations. Using some of the strategies outlined here, the IRS agreed to reduce the penalties to $0.
- Protected an employer from entering into an unfairly one-sided services agreement by identifying services the retirement plan service provider agreed to perform verbally, but failed to document in the contract process. Rewrote proposed contract provisions that would have allowed the service provider to avoid compensating the employer and the plan if it performed its services incorrectly.
- Convinced a surgical group that wanted to correct its plan because it was misworded that it would be in its best financial and other interests to simply amend the plan going forward, thus avoiding the cost of preparing a correction.
- Assisted a hospital spinoff in negotiating a purchase price offset to address the cost of vesting employees who were being terminated.
- Strengthened the case of a class action client sued for improper COBRA notices by reviewing the notice and preparing legal arguments on the issue of how it complied and why any deficiencies were immaterial. The complaint was dismissed days after we filed our motion to dismiss.
- Reduced potential liabilities during a legal review of a client health plan document from a major insurance company by identifying discrepancies under mental health parity requirements, advised on how to correct those discrepancies, and eliminated risks of having to provide additional mental health benefits.
- Provided advice to multiple clients on transgender issues, including whether coverage of transgender surgeries is mandatory when a patient suffers from gender dysmorphia; whether someone waives the ability to get treatments normally reserved for a particular sex when they indicate they are a different gender on their insurance forms; and what the obligations of a claims administrator are when handling transgender claims for companies that might be subject to inconsistent requirements.
Retirement Plan Experience
- 401(a) plans (money purchase pension plans, profit-sharing plans, traditional and cash balance defined benefit plans)
- 401(k) plans (including safe harbor, cross-tested, and automatic enrollment plans)
- 403(b) plans (ERISA and non-ERISA)
- 457(b) plans (governmental and tax-exempt)
- 457(f) plans
- 409A nonqualified plans
- 175/185 insurance premium tax share plans
- Florida Retirement System opt-out plans
- Deferred Retirement Option Programs
Welfare Plan Experience
- 125 Cafeteria plans
- ERISA-only plans
- Wrap documents
- Non-ERISA individual or voluntary plans
- Medical reimbursement plans (HRAs, FSAs, HSAs)
- Self-insured medical plans
- Commercially insured medical plans
- Stop-loss insurance
- Various other welfare plan arrangements (including wellness programs, dependent care assistance programs, adoption assistance programs, vacation pay conversion programs, and education assistance programs)
- Governmental retiree health care
Selected Skills
- Affordable Care Act (ACA) compliance and planning
- Plan drafting and amending
- Retirement plan mergers, acquisitions, and terminations (nongovernmental and governmental, including Florida Retirement System transfers)
- Benefit planning (tailoring welfare benefits to the individual employer)
- Executive compensation
- Benefit reductions
- Plan terminations
- Nondiscrimination
- General retirement and welfare plan compliance
- Welfare plan 5500 planning
- Welfare plan audits
- Structuring non-ERISA individual or voluntary welfare benefits
- Compliance with requirements such as COBRA, HIPAA, FMLA, USERRA, ADA, ADEA, and PHSA
- Retiree health care issues
- Related employment tax issues