**[Five Minute Oral Statement by Jerry Bramlett, President and CEO of
BenefitStreet, Inc.]{.underline}**

Throughout my 25 years in this 401(k) industry building the largest
401(k) focused independent recordkeeper, I have experienced every aspect
of this business up close and developed insights in how we got to the
point that we are at and have developed my own viewpoints of where we
should go from here.

Defined contribution plans have become part of the foundation for
retirement for most individuals and the recent financial crisis no doubt
has the potential to seriously jeopardize the value of the assets in
these plans. In defined benefit plans, the burden of funding, asset
allocation and investment selection belong to an employer under the
constraints of fiduciary laws. With 401(k) plans, all this shifts to the
ill-prepared employee.

Given that the average 401(k) participant is not a professional money
manager, there is a tendency on the part of some to over react in times
of major market downturn. If history repeats itself, markets will return
to more normal levels and for participants to bail out of certain low
performing funds at this time, will only ensure that these losses get
"locked in" for good. And, even participants who are nearing or entering
retirement will remain in the equity markets for sometime -- on the
average another 15 or so years. Even these close-to-retirement employees
can impair their long-term retirement assets by acting precipitously.

That said, participants who do want to make changes -- perhaps seeing
the current market downturn as an opportunity to buy in low -- may be
restricted because of funds that are frozen or have significant
redemption fees - due to no action of their own but as the result of
their employers having chosen investment alternatives that do not
guarantee daily liquidity. Plan Sponsors should be vigilant about not
offering any type of investment that may ultimately lock a participant
down when there is a need to exchange funds for whatever reason that may
be.

Switching to the issue of investment costs, this sudden drop in the
market will highlight for many the high cost of investing in 401(k)
plans. Typically, depending on the size of the company, participants in
401(k)-styled plans may be paying anywhere from two to five percentage
points in fund expenses. Given the impact of inflation and projected low
market returns, it is easy to see that for many participants their
assets are growing very slowly and, in some extreme situations, a
combination of high fees and inflation have stunted the growth of their
funds to near or below zero.

For many participants, the majority who are in small to mid size plans,
by the time they reach retirement as much as half of their assets will
have been siphoned off due to excessive intermediation by the money
management industry --largely due to unnecessary expenses and the power
of the compounding impact of those expenses over time. Much if not most
of these fees are hidden from the human eye or lost in a fog of
financial jargon.

A major policy question for law makers is where do we go from here,
given the fact that what is done is done. Certainly helping participants
identify excessive costs must be at the center of policy reform. To
quote John Bogle, "For as long as our financial system delivers to our
investors in the aggregate whatever returns our stock and bond markets
are generous enough to deliver, but only after the costs of financial
intermediation are deducted, these enormous costs seriously undermine
the odds in favor of success for our citizens who are accumulating
savings for retirement. As we all know, the investor feeds at the bottom
of the costly food chain of investing."

This current crisis should only hasten the effort to give average
working Americans investing in a 401(k) plans the opportunity to access
the value produced by the real economy at the lowest possible cost. To
help accomplish this objective, there needs to be an end to what is
essentially a fee shell game by lifting the fog of expense complexity
that shrouds the retirement industry. Plan sponsors and their
participants need to know in hard dollars verses percentages (or even
worse in basis points) how much they really are spending to access the
returns produced by the real economy and the compounding impact of these
costs over time. This is at the heart of transparency.

In addition to an increased focus on plan sponsors being better informed
and more responsible, each plan sponsor ought to also access outside
investment advisory help and those individuals and organizations should
be held accountable as co-fiduciaries and share co-responsibility that
every plan action is in the best interest of the individual plan
participant.

While I have spoken to the issue of daily liquidity at the fund level,
excessive fees, the need for transparency and greater accountability on
the part of the plan sponsor, I will leave it to my fellow colleagues to
discuss ways in which the defined contribution model can be further
improved upon and expanded to the many workers who are not covered by
any type of private retirement plan.