[chainsaw]

When companies change the administrator of a 401K program, a temporary shutdown, typically lasting several weeks,

With todays computers this should only take hours if not minutes.

¿Several weeks ?     This is Complete spin.

[revtown]

An employee puts in 6% of their pay, Enron gave them 50% match (3%) in Enron stock.
If that 1st 6% didn't have to be in Enron, these employees should of only had at MOST 1/3 of their nest egg in Enron.
Anymore money in Enron is poor financial planning.
Did an employee have to put their 1st 6% in Enron to get the 50% match?

[e_engineer]

When companies change the administrator of a 401K program, a temporary shutdown, typically lasting several weeks,

With todays computers this should only take hours if not minutes.

¿Several weeks ? This is Complete spin.

I can imagine that it could be quite an effort to transfer all of the 401k data for thousands of employees from one database to another, especially if the two systems are structured differently. 401k records would be considerably more complicated than:

Name:
Address:
SSN:
Total:

There would have to be individual records for every contribution by every employee in order to keep track of the vesting, and satisfy the IRS. If both 401k administrators were using the same database design, then it's just a matter of transfering records from one company to another. As another poster said: "Please be aware, I'm not defending ENRON. There is plenty of wrong doing in my mind on the part of the Corporate Officers, the Board of Trustees and Andersen.", but I would like to hear from a Freeper who does this sort of thing (401k plan administration) for a living before assuming that several weeks is an unreasonable length of time to transfer to a new administrator.

Of course, if you are the Freeper that does 401k plan administration for a living, then please ignore this post :-D