As a retirement plan provider, you have something to do with the retirement plan assets and may have some access to it as a third party administrator (TPA) or financial advisor.

If you have access to the retirement plan assets of participants, you need to make sure that there are processes in place to safeguard those assets. I will never forget hearing the story of a TPA where one of their administrators was almost able to procure a rollover to his own individual retirement account of assets belonging to participants of a plan he was working on. The only reason it didn’t work out was because the administrator got the account number wrong on his rollover. Clearly, this TPA didn’t have a process in place to ensure that the assets of the plans they were handling were guarded against such theft.

You need to make sure there are processes in place to protect the theft of retirement plan assets because if your employees are stealing your client’s money, you’ll bear the brunt of it with lost business.