As an administrator, you can find a list of all employees — including terminated employees — and their participation status in the Roster of your 401(k) administrator dashboard. Your roster must remain complete and accurate for record-keeping and reporting purposes. If you believe you need to remove an employee, make sure it is the right action before moving forward. This article explains when removal is appropriate and why terminated employees should stay on your roster.
Removing a participant from your roster should only happen in certain scenarios. Common reasons to request a removal include:
An employee was hired and added to your roster, but never showed up to work and never got any wages
A contractor or any non-W-2 employee was inadvertently added to your roster
Placeholder accounts like "test account" were added
Duplicate accounts exist for one employee
An owner who has not actively been involved in the day-to-day management of the company and has not earned income (either through W-2 wages or self-employment income) from the company was added to the roster
To request the removal of employees from your Gusto 401(k) roster, email [email protected], even if you have already removed the employee from your payroll roster.
Important: Both current and former employees and owners who are earning W-2 wages must remain on your roster. If you are an owner, you may also need to be included on the roster if you are earning income from the company.
Gusto Retirement requires information for all employees who were previously employed and have since been dismissed, generally dating back to six years prior to the plan start date, or any former employee who participated in the 401(k) plan.
Dismissed employee information is used to:
Maintain a complete and accurate record of who was eligible to participate in the plan.
Provide important information about plan benefits to certain dismissed employees who may be entitled to them.
Help us respond to requests from the IRS or DOL. In the event of a claim by a dismissed employee or an audit of your plan, we may need to share records dating back six years.
Rather than removing terminated employees from your roster, list them as dismissed instead. You can find step-by-step instructions for changing the status of an employee to dismissed.