A former worker of Omnicom Group, Inc. is suing the company and plan fiduciaries, accusing them of ERISA violations while managing the firm’s employee benefit plan. The complaint, filed on July 31 in a U.S. District Court in New York, stated that the defendants did not fully disclose the risk and expenses of the plan’s investment options to the participants of the plan. Furthermore, the lawsuit states that the plan fiduciaries permitted “unreasonable expenses to be charged to participants for the administration of the plan.”
Subsequently, the defendants allegedly chose, retained, and ratified expensive and poorly performing investments instead of suggesting more prudent alternatives that were already available. “Defendants either engaged in virtually no examination, comparison or benchmarking of the record-keeping/administrative fees of the plan to those of other similarly-sized 401(k) plans, or were complicit in paying grossly excessive fees,” the lawsuit claimed.
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