IRS 5500 SF - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Pension Systems Corporation Founder
• President, Pension Systems Corporation

Pension Systems Corporation founder, James Gilbert, has been a professional 401k investment advisor for more than 30 years. His career began shortly after the time when the 401k plan first was introduced.

Job Titles:

• Staff Reporter of the WALL STREET JOURNAL

's employer recently adopted a 401(k)-retirement plan for him and his colleagues. Big deal, you say? Well, actually, it is. Mr. Hendricks and the 13 managers who oversee trust-fund operations for a California union have never had access to the hugely popular retirement accounts because of the expense and complexity of running them. Now, though, cheap and efficient technology is changing those notions. Easy-to-use software and low-cost, back-office support - much of it available online - are opening retirement-savings benefits to an estimated 27 million small-business workers who don't have retirement plans. It's also allowing companies with inflexible and meager plans to upgrade to more appealing, full-blown 401 (k) s by pushing down administrative costs and challenging the idea that small-business owners can't manage the rule-bound accounts. "There's been a whole lot of mumbo jumbo used in this industry to create a Tower of Babel that running a 401(k) is tough," says Jim Gilbert, who has spent 15 years in the industry designing and overseeing retirement plans. Mr. Gilbert, president of 401(K) Pro Inc., Los Angeles, recently introduced a software program called 401(k) Easy - which allows small businesses to manage 401(k) plans as easily as a consumer navigates family finances with programs such as Quicken. "This is not brain surgery," he says. Mr. Hendricks, who heads up the administrative office for the Southern California International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers-National Electrical Contractors Association trust fund, began looking for a 401(k) for the managers on his staff, who are not covered by the union or electrical employers. (The trust-fund office is the intermediary between workers and employers.) But plans administered by outside suppliers were so expensive - $17,000 in one instance - "that I shut the book immediately," Mr. Hendricks says. Some providers "didn't want to talk to us when they found out how small we were." Instead, he found the answer to the group's retirement needs on the Internet for less than $1,000 - in Mr. Gilbert's program. Now, his office controller, who has no background in back-office plan administration, is running the retirement program for the group, which is one of two test sites for 401(k) Easy.