A 76-page PowerPoint presentation from a live Lorman Telecom webinar, “Navigating Pension and Annuity Payments: General Rule and Taxation Guidelines,” is now available by clicking here.

The webinar covered distributions from qualified plans (pension, profit sharing, stock bonus, and 401(k), including Roth accounts), IRAs (regular and Roth), and commercial annuities. Topics covered:

• Sources of distributions (employer contributions, employee deferrals, Roths, after-tax contributions, and rollovers);
• Restrictions on how early and how late distributions can be taken;
• Penalties on early withdrawals;
• Taxation of lump sum distributions;
• Taxation of withdrawals and partial distributions;
• Taxation of annuities and other periodic payments;
• Plan withholding and reporting; and
• Participant reporting.

The article, dealing with the proposed IRS regulations dealing with the definition of normal retirement age for governmental plans, is subscription only. However, in relevant part, it said:

The proposed rules generally were favorable, allowing plans to maintain the status quo in most cases, Carol V. Calhoun, president of the Bethesda, Md.-based Calhoun Law Group, [now Counsel at Venable LLP, Washington, DC] told Bloomberg BNA on Feb. 4.

“They say a governmental plan does not have to define normal retirement age, that it will be at whatever point you can receive a normal retirement benefit under the plan that is not reduced actuarially,” Calhoun said. For instance, the rules said that if a governmental plan says that normal retirement age is 25 years of service, then that will be considered the normal retirement age, she said.

Qualified Government Plan

A qualified governmental plan is one that is established and maintained for its employees by the federal government, a state government or political subdivision thereof, or by any agency or instrumentality of the federal or state government. The proposed rules “basically took all of the normal retirement ages that any state-wide plan has and they said all of those were going to be acceptable,” Calhoun said.

More discussion of the proposed rules can be found at this link.

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