Notice will soon become part of the new world of information technology as it will be offered through an electronic Academic Senate "home-page" that is currently under construction. Joining it as an initial item on the home-page will be the Manual of the Academic Senate. Both publications will be available through the Internet on a World Wide Web site.
The Manual, in particular, will lend itself to the advantages offered by the Web's "hypertext" formatting capability, which allows readers to skip directly to references contained in a given text. Over time, the Notice site will become an archival repository, containing both current and back issues. Current plans call, however, for Notice to continue to be distributed to Senate members on all campuses as a printed publication. Upcoming issues of Notice will contain the address (or "URL") of the Senate's home-page.
University of California annuitants who must take minimum distributions from their voluntary 403(b) accumulations got some welcome news this fall when UC Benefits announced that, henceforth, annuitants would no longer have to decide for themselves what these distributions should be. Benefits will now perform the distribution calculations by making use of either a standard formula or of individual "parameters" supplied by annuitants.
Another change has come about with this year's distributions, however, which may not be so welcome. Earlier this year, the Internal Revenue Service updated a publication (No. 571) that sets forth guidelines on the distributions that must be taken from 403(b) funds accumulated before January 1, 1987. With issuance of this publication, UC decided that, henceforth, annuitants 75 and older must take minimum distributions from their pre-1987 funds. Prior to this update, UC had been advised that the IRS did not require such distributions and UC annuitants over 75 were thus allowed to leave them untouched.
This earlier view of the issue stood in contrast to that taken by the TIAA-CREF system, which for years has required annuitants age 75 and over to take distributions from all their accumulations, including those acquired before 1987.