From Principal Financial Group

BIO

Paul DeWitt (left) is a lead client service manager at Principal, providing ongoing retirement plan services to institutional clients. He oversees daily plan administration and recordkeeping operations and serves as the primary day‑to‑day contact for plan sponsors. DeWitt supports investment-, plan-compliance- and plan-document-related demands; participant enrollment and education; and consultation on the Principal recordkeeping systems. In his role, he collaborates closely with the compliance-testing, Form 5500, audit, processing and data-management teams.

Nicole Windish (right), senior client service manager at Principal, brings over 27 years of retirement plan administration experience. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she began in the contact center before advancing to large-market-client administration.

NOMINATOR COMMENTS

A commercial insurance company said: “We embarked on a pension participant cleanup project this year to locate any potential missing beneficiaries for our traditional and cash balance pension plans. Paul was instrumental in assisting with this project—coordinating between us and the actuaries and our advisers, doing additional research in the recordkeeper archives and communicating in a prompt and timely manner to keep the project moving along.

“During our 2023 401(k) audit, our auditors discovered an untimely contribution—made 10 days later than our normal contribution time frame—based on an internal issue. Nicole, our senior client service manager, stepped up and explained the issue to us, provided the calculation of last earnings so we could document that on the 11-K filing with the Form 5500 and assured me that this does happen even though it had not happened to us before. She provided feedback and documentation to our auditors. She also did a review of our contributions for 2024 to make sure we were meeting the timeliness guidelines as recommended by our auditor.”

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