Quote from tschotland:
Hello,
Is anyone here trading futures in a retirement account (IRA or qualified plan) with MFGlobal or Peregrine Financial? Did you have to sign a personal guaranty on the account? I have been asked to do so. The problem is I have been told by numerous taxation and ERISA specialists that this is a prohibited transaction, specifically an extension of credit between a disqualified person and the plan. See IRC 4975(c)(1)(B).
The consequences of this are extremely severe. An IRA ceases to exist as of the day the transaction was entered, with the entire account considered to be distributed and taxable as of that day. For a qualified plan you owe some sort of enormous tax on the transaction each year until it is reversed, whatever that would mean when you've been trading a futures account for years.
MFGlobal tells me countless clients have signed this guaranty on their retirment funds. On the other hand, when I showed the guaranty agreement to an IRA custodian that has clients with accounts at MFGlobal, they said they had never seen it before and it was definitely a prohibited transaction. They said I was the first person to raise the issue among thousands of people trading futures in their IRAs.
The MFGlobal guaranty includes language that makes the guarantor state they know that by signing the guaranty they are not breaking any laws - very nice for MFGlobal.
It seems incredible to me that this issue, if real, has never been addressed before. Does anyone here know anything about it? It's like a landmine waiting to explode in the futures industry.
