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By Jon Coupal
Anyone in California who would like to open an individual retirement account can walk into, or log into, any number of well-established financial services companies to see an array of options. One of those options is to have an automatic recurring withdrawal from current earnings or savings. It’s a useful way to “pay yourself first” and save money for the future.
There’s no need for a government program to enable automatic withdrawals from paychecks in order to deposit money into retirement-savings investments approved by the government.
That’s why the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association filed a lawsuit in 2018 challenging CalSavers, the newly enacted state-run retirement savings program for private-sector employees. When fully implemented, CalSavers will impose burdens and risks on private employers since participation is mandatory for most employers who do not offer a company retirement program. Those burdens are just now manifesting themselves as the program ramps up.
The legal claim against CalSavers was based on ERISA — the federal law governing retirement programs. Our lawsuit was supported by the Trump administration’s Department of Labor, which filed an amicus curiae brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal agreeing with HJTA’s position that CalSavers was inconsistent with the intent of ERISA to pre-empt the field of regulating retirement plans. When Joe Biden was elected President, he directed the Labor Department to withdraw its support of our lawsuit.
To read the entire column, please click here.
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