In a world of eager good cops, the trustee stands alone with the onerous fiduciary duty to repeatedly play the bad cop. It's hard. It hurts. It's almost never appreciated. 

But, believe or not, there is substantial case law where beneficiaries have successfully sued trustees for a fiduciary breach when the trustees did the exact thing the beneficiaries asked them to do.

You see, a trustee is paid for only one reason: To do what is in the best interests of the beneficiary, even (and especially) when said beneficiary insists it's not what he wants.

Yes, the trustee is the financial in loco parentis that sternly towers over the backs of beneficiaries as they're forced to eat their vegetables. 

Yep. It's the curse of the trustee. 

I mention this because it's become apparent that disclosing fees to 401(k) plan participants (as opposed to 401(k) plan sponsors) just isn't working out the way it was intended.

In fact, it may be doing the opposite of what regulators and all aspiring good cops expected of it, (see "Top Ten Reasons Why 401k Participant Fee Disclosure Hurts Employees' Retirement Prospects," FiduciaryNews.com, April 14, 2015). 

There's this neat psychological trick having to do with proximity. The closer you are to something, the more important that thing becomes to you.

Closeness, mind you, isn't merely physical, it can also be a function of memory. According to page 63 of Advances in Cognitive Neurodynamics (IV): Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of Cognitive Neurodynamics – 2013 (Hans Liljenström, editor, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht, 2015) "the father of modern psychology William James (1842-1910) said: 'There's nothing so absurd that if you repeat it often enough, people will believe it.'" 

In other words, if we tell 401(k) plan participants that fees are important, they will eventually think fees are important. 

"But they are important," many of you are immediately thinking.

You're right, but oh, so, very wrong.

As practitioners, as fiduciaries, we know they're important. But we all know when they're important, when they're not important, and just how important they are relative to other factors.

Our knowledge on this subject is deep and comprehensive. For the typical 401(k) plan participant, the depth of their understanding is no more than 1.5 millimeters (the thickness of the epidermal layer at its largest point or, in more colloquial terms, "skin deep").  

How can we expect 401(k) plan participants to fully understand the true meaning of plan fees when 401(k) plan sponsors have a hard time getting their arms around fees? This is truly a case where "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing." 

This, in turn, begs the question: "Is no knowledge safer for 401(k) plan participants than a little knowledge?"

Which brings us smack dab back to our original dilemma: The Curse of the Trustee. We may be nearing the point when someone has to play the bad cop and tell the DOL 401(k) plan participants cannot eat their dessert (see their plan fees) before they eat they're vegetables (increase their savings rate to a point where they are most likely to be retirement ready).

Think of it as incentivizing the curious employee to do the right thing.