Secure choice plans chugging along despite pandemic

Despite the economic toll COVID-19 has taken on small businesses across the nation, state-sponsored retirement plans have remained resilient with employee contributions holding steady, withdrawals under control and employer registrations inching higher, however slowly.

"We are still growing," said Courtney Eccles, the Chicago-based director of the Illinois Secure Choice retirement savings program. "We're seeing the number of employers who are registering continue to increase. We're seeing the number of savers who've been added continue to grow."

The state-sponsored plans, which are usually structured as Roth individual retirement accounts, typically require private-sector employers that do not offer workplace retirement plans to do so through the state-provided programs.

At Janico Building Services, a North Highlands, Calif.-based janitorial services company enrolled in California's CalSavers retirement program, employees stayed the course, said Lorenzo Harris, the owner of the business.

The company's 45 employees continued to contribute 5% of their semimonthly gross pay to the state-run retirement plan, the same as they did before the outbreak of the coronavirus. In addition, employee participation in the plan also remained stable at roughly 70%, Mr. Harris said.

The company did not have to lay off any of its workers as clients cutting back on office cleaning services were offset by those demanding more. "We made an effort to make sure that our employees were safe and reassured them that their jobs were safe as well," Mr. Harris said, adding the job security was likely a major reason why employees did not stray from their normal savings behavior.

While many companies did not fare as well economically as Janico, the overall impact of the pandemic on state retirement plans nevertheless appears to have been restrained, according to interviews with state program leaders.

Indeed, in California, Illinois and Oregon — the three states with the longest-running state-sponsored programs — employee contributions held steady or inched up slightly higher. Meanwhile, employee withdrawals, which many dreaded would be severe, weren't nearly as serious as feared. Pro- gram executives posited that the muted impact may have been tied to the stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits that were part of the federal government's fiscal stimulus package, as well as possibly the newness of the state plans.

"It could be that because we're a new program, it's not on their minds as another source to tap into," said Katie Selenski, the Sacramento-based executive director of the $4.3 million CalSavers program, which rolled out statewide in July 2019.Average monthly employee contributions to CalSavers remained in the same $105 to $120 range as they did before COVID-19, Ms. Selenski said.

The $23 million Illinois Secure Choice program, which launched in November 2018, observed a similar pattern, with participants contributing an average of $82 to $87 a month since January. The near 3-year-old OregonSaves, which has nearly $57 million in assets, in contrast, saw a slight uptick in employee contributions, climbing to an average of $127 to $135 a month, up from $112 to $120 before April.

While the programs saw withdrawals increase soon after the pandemic hit, the withdrawals have subsided and returned to normal levels. The CalSavers program, for example, hit peak withdrawals in early May when 9.7% of all funded accounts had money pulled out, up from 8.7% in early January. That has since settled back to 8.2%, according to Ms. Selenski.

"We were expecting the withdrawals to be much higher than they are," she said.

For the Illinois program, the withdrawal percentage increased to 13.7% at the end of May from 10.7% in early January, an increase that was partly attributed to hundreds of employers adding employees to the program earlier in the year, Ms. Eccles said.

"We often see higher withdrawal numbers during the onboarding months" when employees see the change in their paychecks, she said.

OregonSaves, in turn, saw withdrawals peak at $1.3 million in March but have since normalized, falling to $529,250 in May, said Michael Parker, the Salem, Ore.-based executive director of the Oregon Treasury Savings Network, which administers OregonSaves.

The plans, however, did not get by entirely unscathed. Illinois and Oregon saw declines in total employee contributions, the result of employers having closed temporarily or working with fewer employees. In May, aggregate monthly contributions for the Illinois Secure Choice program fell to $2.1 million from almost $3 million in March, while OregonSaves dipped below $3 million from more than $4 million in February.

Neither Illinois Secure Choice nor OregonSaves officials were concerned about the reduction in overall contributions, saying that the numbers would recover once people started to return to work.

"We expect to see this number move back up as employers begin reopening," said Ms. Eccles, adding that she anticipated the number to return to where it was in June and July.

CalSavers, interestingly, saw an increase in total monthly contributions as employers in the onboarding pipeline used the downtime during the pandemic to "catch up on administrative tasks," Ms. Selenksi said. Monthly contributions rose to $680,000 in May from $495,000 in February.

The trends are akin to those of the U.K.'s £11.4 billion ($14.1 billion) National Employment Savings Trust, a government-mandated program that is similar to the U.S. state-sponsored retirement plans. Average monthly contributions — which include both minimum employee and employer contributions (unlike the U.S. plans where employers do not contribute to the plans and employees are not required to make minimum contributions) — have remained at £116, virtually unchanged from £117 in the first quarter, according to Mark Rowlands, NEST's director of customer engagement. Unlike the U.S., however, the NEST program saw no significant changes in withdrawals over the past few months, other than a dip in the number of employees retiring in April, which returned to normal levels in May.

"We've been pleased to offer our customers an uninterrupted service and overall we've not seen significant shifts in customer trends," Mr. Rowlands said.

The programs also continued to add employers, albeit at a slower pace. CalSavers, for example, had 1,817 employers registered at the end of May, up from 1,329 on March 1.

"The rate of growth flattened," said Ms. Selenksi, explaining that the program registered 514 employers in February but only 43 in May.

Mindful of the pressures facing small employers, the state-run plans have relaxed deadlines for registration. CalSavers, for example, extended its registration deadline for employers with more than 100 employees to Sept. 30 from June 30.

"We really slowed down on our ambitious advertising and marketing effort with employers," Ms. Selenski said. Illinois Secure Choice, too, is "taking a pause" with employers that were impacted by the pandemic. "We're taking a much lighter touch," Ms. Eccles said.

Illinois Secure Choice had 5,544 registered employers at the end of May, up from 5,270 on Jan. 1.

OregonSaves also slowed down its onboarding efforts, having already delayed the May 15 registration deadline for employers with up to four employees to at least January, Mr. Parker said.

"Our message was intended to offer extra support and flexibility for businesses that may not be in a position to begin facilitating the program right now," he said.

OregonSaves has some 14,000 employers registered, of which 5,600 employers have started payroll deductions. Between February and April, the number of employer registrations plateaued at around 13,850, but has since ticked up, according to Mr. Parker.

Whether and how quickly the pace of growth will accelerate is an open question as the state plans try to get a read on how deeply the pandemic hurt the economy and more specifically how many employers it will put out of business.

"I think we'll all have to see what happens in the coming months," Ms. Eccles said. "Even if it does slow the growth of the program somewhat, there's still such a need with thousands and thousands of employers in this state."