Possibly not, and the label on it has nothing to do with the answer. Whether a voluntary benefit sits outside ERISA depends on four conditions about how the employer behaves. Miss any one of them and the program is an ERISA plan, with the fiduciary duties that come with that — regardless of what the enrollment materials call it.

Twelve lawsuits have been filed over voluntary benefits since December 2025. In September 2026, a federal court ruled for the first time that a specific employer's conduct had pulled a supplemental program inside. This is a reasonable moment for employers to check.

An RFP is supposed to help a committee make a good decision. But when that decision is questioned later — by participants, auditors, regulators, or in litigation — the RFP also becomes evidence of how the decision was made.

A defensible RFP is one that holds up under that kind of review. It doesn't guarantee a particular outcome. It shows that the committee followed a careful, fair, and documented process.

For many employers, the benefits broker is the most influential outside voice in the health plan. Brokers help shape plan design, bring vendors to the table, negotiate renewals, and often advise on strategy.

That influence is exactly why the relationship deserves periodic, structured review. This guide covers what to evaluate, how compensation disclosure works, how often to look, and what to document.

Most retirement plan committees know they should review their advisor. Fewer know how often, what the review should include, or what counts as a real evaluation versus a routine check-in.

There's no single number in the law. But there is a clear expectation that plan fiduciaries keep watching the providers they hire — and a set of practical signals that tell you when it's time to look more closely.

Pharmacy costs are one of the largest and least understood parts of an employer health plan. Most plan sponsors know what they pay. Far fewer can explain how that price was built, who earns money along the way, or whether a better arrangement exists.

Evaluating a benefits broker means reviewing what they are paid from every source, what services they actually deliver, and how they surveyed the market on your behalf — then documenting whether the arrangement is reasonable.

Anyone who spent the last two decades around retirement plan oversight has an odd experience reading health benefits news right now. The developments are not surprising. They are familiar.

A request for proposal is a monitoring exercise, not a termination process. Plan sponsors have a duty under ERISA to monitor the services and fees of the providers they hire, and a competitive evaluation is the standard way to do it. Incumbent advisors frequently win these processes. When they do, the plan sponsor ends up holding something they did not have before — documented evidence that the arrangement is competitive.

Most plan sponsors who ask whether their pharmacy benefit arrangement is competitive receive a confident answer. It is usually some version of this: our pooled pricing outperforms what you would get negotiating alone against Caremark, Express Scripts, or Optum.

Retirement plan committees spent roughly  fifteen years learning a set of lessons the hard way. Health and welfare committees are now entering the same sequence —and they have the unusual advantage of being able to read ahead.

I call this Parallel Paths. The premise is simple: the forces that transformed retirement plan governance are appearing in health benefits, in the same order, roughly a decade later.

We benchmarked last year" is one of the most common answers a retirement plan committee gives when asked about provider oversight. It is a legitimate answer. It is also, frequently, an answer to a different question than the one being asked.

For most of ERISA's history, fee transparency was a retirement plan conversation. Group health plan sponsors operated with far less visibility into what their service providers were paid, by whom, and for what. That gap closed in 2021, and it has continued to narrow since.

Pooled employer plans have moved from novelty to mainstream. More than 50,000 401(k) plan sponsors have adopted a PEP model since SECURE 2.0, and adoption continues to build as small and midsize employers revisit vendor contracts and fiduciary workloads.

Most organizations approach the health benefit broker RFP as a procurement exercise. They issue a questionnaire, collect responses, compare fees, and select a winner. That process is better than nothing. But it falls short of what a well-designed RFP is actually capable of — and what regulators, courts, and ERISA counsel increasingly expect.

Most plan sponsors believe their health benefit broker is compensated by a commission or a flat advisory fee. Some are. Many are not — or at least not only. Broker compensation in the health benefits market is layered, and the layers that are hardest to see are often the ones that create the most significant conflicts of interest.

If you ask most health benefit brokers whether they put their clients first, you will get a confident yes. Some will hand you a brochure. Some will point to their mission statement. A few will add language to their service agreement that sounds substantial. Almost none will actually commit to operating as a fiduciary — because that commitment comes with real obligations they are not willing to accept.

For decades, retirement plan advisors operated in a world where conflicts of interest were common, compensation was opaque, and 'what's best for the client' was more of a tagline than a legal obligation. Then came ERISA, DOL rulemaking, and a wave of litigation that changed everything. Retirement advisors today must disclose compensation, avoid prohibited transactions, and in many cases formally adopt a fiduciary standard. That transformation didn't happen overnight — but it happened. Health benefits are next.

One of the most common mistakes organizations make during vendor evaluations is underestimating the amount of time the process requires. Many RFPs begin too late in the cycle — often just months before open enrollment or renewal periods. At that stage, organizations are already focused on implementation and execution. This compressed timeline can limit the effectiveness of the evaluation itself.

Many organizations describe their RFP process as independent. But independence involves more than simply using a third party.

A truly independent process is defined by how evaluation criteria are established, how providers are compared, how compensation is reviewed, and how decisions are documented. The structure behind the process matters.

Fifteen years ago, the retirement plan industry was shaken by a fiduciary reckoning that most employers never saw coming. Brokers who had quietly collected undisclosed compensation from investment providers were suddenly required to disclose every dollar, legally sign on as fiduciaries, and operate in the full light of regulatory scrutiny. The firms that hadn’t prepared paid a steep price.