Overview

Federal tax policy is designed to accomplish numerous goals, from funding government to encouraging socially-beneficial actions such as saving for retirement. ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, was created principally to meet the latter objective.
ERISA created an individual retirement arrangement—usually referred to simply as an IRA—to encourage taxpayers who were not participants in an employer-sponsored qualified retirement plan to save money to fund their future retirement needs. 

These early ERISA provisions offering tax benefits to individuals funding IRAs have been extended in subsequent legislative actions to:
• Unemployed spouses;
• Qualified retirement plan participants; and
• Taxpayers preferring tax-free distributions instead of deductible contributions.

Since that earlier ERISA expansion related to IRAs, new IRAs have been added, including Roth IRAs that offer tax-free qualified distributions rather than deductible contributions. In order to differentiate the newer Roth IRA from its earlier cousin, the original IRA is now referred to as a “traditional” IRA.

Learning objectives

Upon completion of this course, you should be able to understand:

• Impact of December 2019 legislation on IRAs
  • Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement Act of 2019 (SECURE Act)
  • Taxpayer Certainty and Disaster Tax Relief Act of 2019
• Taxation of individual retirement arrangements (IRAs) including
  • traditional and
  • Roth IRAs
• Federal rules concerning:
  • contribution limits and tax treatment;
  • tax treatment of traditional IRA distributions, including regular, early and lifetime required minimum distributions;
  • tax treatment of qualified and nonqualified Roth IRA distributions; and
  • required distributions at death; and IRA rollovers.