Advanced IRAs

Financial organizations are frequently faced with handling beneficiary death claims and may wonder how to resolve some of their more complex beneficiary issues where there may be no or limited regulatory guidance. This comprehensive course covers in-depth aspects of Traditional and Roth IRA beneficiary issues and best practices on how to handle death claims while mitigating risk. The course covers advanced aspects of IRA disclaimers, distributions to trust beneficiaries, reporting issues, disputes, minors as beneficiaries, and other compliance concerns.

Learn all aspects of the Roth IRA, including features and benefits, and how the Roth IRA stands out from other retirement savings accounts. You’ll leave this course with a thorough understanding of the tax advantages, contribution eligibility rules, reporting requirements, portability options, and distribution options—including the popular Roth IRA loophole.

IRA Institute is a training program that provides in-depth instruction on the “need-to-know” aspects of Traditional IRAs, Roth IRAs, SEP plans and SIMPLE IRAs. IRA Institute integrates extensive IRA material, objective-based training methods, and practical applications of the rules to create the ideal learning environment.

Our experts will outline the top 10 IRA topics we get questions about on Ascensus’ consulting lines. Join this webinar to see what makes this year’s Top 10 list!

Diving deeper into the beneficiary options covered in IRA Beneficiary Distributions – Part 1, in this session you will take a more hands-on approach to handling certain year-of-death requirements, beneficiary portability, separate accounting rules, the beneficiary determination deadline, and beneficiary reporting requirements. For a deeper dive into advanced beneficiary issues, see IRAs: Handling Complex Death Claims and IRA Trust Beneficiary Issues and How to Handle Them.

Ascensus conducts countless compliance audits for financial organizations across the U.S., oftentimes finding issues that could result in substantial IRS penalties due to non-compliance with IRS requirements. In this course, find out about the most common “points of failure” that our auditors have found, and which aspects of your IRA program you may discover are out of compliance. The course will guide you through these compliance concerns and provide checklists to help manage the compliance process, to help you avoid common pitfalls that may end up costing you thousands of dollars in IRS penalties.

Although financial organization personnel do not give tax advice to their clients, IRA administrators still may find themselves fielding legal questions. Generally, there is no IRS guidance on how to handle IRA legal issues. This course covers some of the more common legal issues that may arise with IRAs, such as powers of attorney, guardianships, creditors, beneficiary issues, and divorce; as well as how to handle these types of transactions to help mitigate risk for your organization.

Trust beneficiary questions are one of the most common topics that come into our consulting lines. Trusts can be used for many reasons, such as estate planning, avoiding probate, and maintaining control over assets. As such, designating a trust as an IRA beneficiary has become a popular estate planning strategy. During this course we’ll review current guidance for distributing IRA assets to a trust beneficiary. We also cover compliance concerns that are frequently encountered, and the risks financial organizations should be aware of in this legal grey-area.

Ascend is the industry’s most comprehensive education conference offering basic and advanced courses on: retirement, health, and education savings plans and industry trends.

This course walks through everything you need to know about excess contributions, including handling recharacterizations. You will learn how excess contributions occur, the different excess correction methods, and how you can help an IRA owner correct an excess contribution.

eLearning provides you with access to convenient and effective training through an online library of courses on qualified retirement plans, Traditional and Roth IRAs, SEP and SIMPLE IRA plans, heath savings accounts, and education savings accounts. Individual courses are available through our learning management system (LMS), Ascensus University for unlimited access for 30 days.

Ascensus University is also available for year-round access or you may license our eLearning library for use by your financial organization staff within a shared directory or installed into your LMS.

Get the benefit of our experienced instructors and extensive curriculum without leaving the office with our on-site IRA workshops. Our IRA Essentials, Advanced IRAs, and Frontline Fundamentals curriculum offer flexibility and customization and give practical understanding of critical rules and operational issues.

For our IRA Administration subscribers, Ascensus has two IRAdirect® workshops that give general users and advanced users the foundation they need to work confidently with this software.

IRAdirect® is a registered trademark of Ascensus, LLC.

Fulfill your career, obtain IRA knowledge and skills, and become indispensable to your organization by earning two professional designations in less than 12 months.

Step 1: Register for IRA University and the CIS I exam.
Step 2: Register for Ascend and the CIS II exam.
Step 3: Participate in the IRA University and pass the CIS I exam.
Step 4: Attend Ascend and pass the CIS II exam.

This course provides answers to your clients’ rollover questions by explaining all the rollover opportunities, including evolving portability rules between IRAs and employer plans. You will learn how to capture, facilitate, and report rollovers between employer plans and IRAs, as well as become familiar with new requirements from the DOL regarding making rollover recommendations to clients.

This course explores the different types of qualified retirement plans (QRPs) and gives a general overview of QRP operations including eligibility, contributions, and portability.

Participants often have questions when it comes to taking distributions from their retirement plans. This course will focus on the various ways that plan participants can distribute their plan assets. Topics covered include in-service distributions, hardship distributions, plan loans, rollover options.