News UMass Law: Tabor Testifies Before ERISA Advisory Council on Record Keeping in the Digital Age

Professor Anna-Marie Tabor tells the U.S. Department of Labor’s ERISA Advisory Council why retirees need stronger benefit protections.

This September, visiting professor Anna-Marie Tabor testified before the ERISA Advisory Council, which advises the Department of Labor on matters affecting employee benefit plans. The topic was “Recordkeeping in the Digital Age,” which Professor Tabor is no stranger to, having served five years as the Director of the Pension Action Center (PAC), a regional pension counseling and information center that is located at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

“The quality of a retirement plan’s recordkeeping can make or break participant access to benefits,” said Tabor. Professor Tabor explained how retirees are prevented from claiming their pension and 401(k) benefits because their companies lost important plan records. She testified that plan sponsors should keep retirement plan records for the lifetime of the participant to ensure that all workers are able to claim the benefits they earned.

Tabor described how former employers turn away her clients on the grounds that they are not listed in the official plan records, even when the clients share extensive documentation from their personal files.

For example, she told the story of one former client, “Ron,” who could not start his pension. Poor electronic recordkeeping was at the root of the problem. After his former employer merged with another company, Human Resources failed to transfer all the pension data to a new computer system. As a result, the employer erroneously dropped Ron from the list of former employees who were owed a pension. 

Tabor and other witnesses testified that these types of problems occur frequently, particularly when an employer has gone through one or more mergers. “Plans and participants would benefit from an honest and open discussion about how plans should respond when a bona fide participant is missing from the plan’s records,” Tabor testified. “This is a common and costly problem. Currently these costs are borne by the individual participants who are denied the benefits they earned.”

Professor Tabor’s remarks are available here.

Click here to view the ERISA Advisory Council’s Issue Statement on Recordkeeping in the Electronic Age.