John Hancock 401(k) Tax Credit Win Needs New Look, Trustees Say

Retirement plan trustees suing John Hancock Life Insurance Co. asked the Eleventh Circuit to rethink its recent decision rejecting claims that the company wrongly pocketed more than $100 million in foreign tax credits that should have gone to the plan.

The October decision—which held that John Hancock wasn’t a plan fiduciary subject to liability under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act—mistakenly overlooked a Labor Department regulation defining “plan assets” under the statute, the trustees said. Under that regulation, plan assets include a plan’s investment and interest in the underlying assets of an insurance company’s separate account, the trustees said ...