Rolling over can be hard to do but it shouldn’t have to be, according to Millennium Trust.

The Department of Labor’s fiduciary rulemaking may have unintended consequences for rolling over old workplace 401(k)s, says Terry Dunne, managing director of Oak Brook, Ill.-based Millennium Trust’s Rollover Solutions Group, as many brokers and advisors do not want to deal with regulatory burdens for smaller IRAs.

“Somewhere around 80 percent of the rollovers that come to us are from active plans, with account balances less than $5,000,” says Dunne. “Advisors don’t really have much interest in those balances. Terminating plans might rollover balances that are quite large, but many advisors lack the resources to go find the account holders. Many firms have decided that they want to get out of this small IRA business altogether because they don’t want to consume the amount of energy that the DOL rule would require of them.”

Especially as millennials tread career paths that zig-zag between employers, Americans too frequently abandon or cash out of their old 401(k) plans due to the already complex rollover process, which is why Dunne is a proponent of automated rollovers.

Automated rollovers, which move 401(k) assets into an IRA at a certain level of account inactivity or when an employer terminates their plan, should be seen as a behavioral solution for better 401(k)s, says Dunne. And included with auto enrollment and auto escalation as easy fixes for more effective, participant-friendly workplace retirement plans.

While most plan fiduciaries enact automated rollovers as part of their plan agreement to help participants save time and money in the rollover process, many small- and mid-sized plans have not adopted a rollover provision.

“Most larger employers have already added an automated rollover provision to their plan agreement,” says Dunne. “For smaller plan sponsors, coming up with a process to move participants who become missing or unresponsive should be part of their fiduciary duty.”

At the same time, by automatically moving a 401(k) into a rollover IRA after a certain period of inactivity, a participant’s retirement savings can be preserved along with all of the tax benefits of a traditional retirement account.

By opting for automated rollovers, plan fiduciaries and personal financial planners can more easily track down and manage old plans. Dunne estimates that old 401(k) plans are lost or abandoned by 900,000 U.S. workers each year, many of which are lost merely because a 401(k) sponsor goes out of business. That's an issue automated rollovers already help address.

Millennium Trust succeeds in tracking down approximately 90 percent of its account holders, says Dunne. “Almost every working age adult has one thing in common: a cellphone. If they have a cell phone, someone knows their address to send them a monthly bill. We can track them down; they typically call us back and ask us if we are for real and if we really do have money that belongs to them. When our answer is 'yes,' it usually comes as a pleasant surprise.”

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