Fiduciary governance. A committee, a charter and a record.

If your company sponsors a health plan, the people who make decisions about it carry fiduciary duties whether or not anyone wrote them down. Ethos Benefits sets up your benefits committee and its charter, runs four committee meetings a year, and keeps every decision and its reasoning in one record.

Request a Strategic Analysis See the Fiduciary Framework™

What you get.

Your retirement plan probably has a committee, a charter and minutes. Your health plan, the larger and less predictable spend, usually has a renewal meeting and an email thread.

A committee and a charterWho sits on the committee, what it decides, how often it meets, and how conflicts of interest are handled, agreed in writing.
Four meetings a yearGovernance, documents and vendors, compliance, and strategy, one each quarter, prepared and run by Ethos under the Fiduciary Framework™.
Minutes for every meetingOne-page minutes that record what was reviewed, what was decided and why, filed in your Fiduciary OS.
A signed kickoff recordBefore each open enrollment, the final plan decisions, the committee's reasoning, contributions and the broker compensation disclosure in one signed document.
Vendor and contract reviewsCarrier, TPA, PBM and stop-loss contracts reviewed against a fiduciary checklist, with the gaps and the fixes documented.
Stewardship reportingRegular stewardship reports and a transparency log of what Ethos did for your plan, and an annual stewardship report on plan performance, vendors, compliance and recommendations.
A quarterly self-assessmentA score for your committee's fiduciary practice, so you can see the gaps and track them closing.

What the committee does.

Your benefits committee is the group that makes decisions about the health plan on the company’s behalf. With Ethos, it:

approves the plan’s goals and the three to five year plan in the Fiduciary Framework™,
reviews vendors, contracts and compensation disclosures on a schedule,
decides on renewals and plan changes with the options side by side, and
signs off on the record of each decision.

How a year runs.

Quarter	Meeting	What gets decided
1	Governance and foundation	Committee structure, charter, conflicts of interest, fiduciary training
2	Documents and vendors	Plan documents, vendor contracts, compensation disclosures, due diligence
3	Compliance and regulatory review	Disclosures, filings, notices and attestations due this year
4	Strategy, monitoring and risk	Funding, plan design, vendor scorecards and results against target

The record you keep.

Every meeting produces one-page minutes. Every plan decision is recorded with the reasoning behind it. Every vendor review, disclosure and compliance filing is filed in the same place. If an auditor, a regulator or your own counsel asks how a decision was made, the answer is already written down.

That record lives in the Ethos Fiduciary OS, in your committee’s fiduciary file.

Stewardship, in writing.

Your committee shouldn’t have to take our word for the work. Ethos keeps a transparency log of what it did for your plan, reports on it regularly, and delivers an annual stewardship report covering plan performance, vendor activity, compliance actions and recommendations for the year ahead.

Independently validated.

The Validation Institute is an independent, third-party organization whose mission is to improve the quality and cost of health care, by checking the claims that health care vendors and advisors make, so employers can tell real results from marketing. At its 2026 Health Value Awards it named Donovan Ryckis and Chelsea Ryckis of Ethos Benefits among its Advisors of the Year, recognizing them as validated Charter Fiduciary Advisors.

Ethos backs its fiduciary standard with a $100,000 financial fiduciary guarantee issued through the Validation Institute and written into the Ethos client agreement.

Why it matters.

ERISA judges fiduciaries on process. A committee that can show what it looked at, what it decided and why is in a far stronger position than one that can’t. Read what the duty requires.

Questions employers ask about this.

Does ERISA require a benefits committee?

Not by name. ERISA requires that the people who manage the plan meet their fiduciary duties. A committee with a charter and minutes is the clearest way to show who decided what, and that they followed a prudent process.

Who should sit on the committee?

Usually people from HR and finance, with an executive sponsor, sized so it can meet every quarter. Ethos prepares the materials and runs the meetings. The committee makes the decisions.

Does a committee add liability for the people on it?

The duties exist whether or not there is a committee. A documented committee puts the process on the record and spreads decisions across several people, which is better protection than decisions made by one person at renewal.

How is this different from the Fiduciary Framework™?

The Fiduciary Framework™ is the plan itself, with its goals, targets and quarterly reviews. Fiduciary governance is how Ethos sets up and runs the committee that owns that plan.

See what your plan is really costing you.

A Strategic Analysis starts with your plan documents and your broker agreement, then shows you what your plan costs, where the risk sits, and what a committee would decide with the full picture.

Request a Strategic Analysis Call (407) 803-4710