Crain News Service
When Austin Industries Inc. decided to terminate its defined benefit pension plan in 1995, one obstacle stood in the way: finding all of the participants entitled to benefits.
Even after using search firms, the privately held Dallas construction company could not account for 74 of 2,916 participants.
"Some of the individuals had been gone for 10 or 12 years and just didn't keep in touch," recalled Linda Bayless, Austin's benefit manager.
Buying annuities from an insurance company, which then would have the responsibility of finding the participants and paying them promised benefits, was not practical because of the small amount of benefits involved.
On average, the participants were each entitled to just a little more than $900.
And banks were not interested in establishing accounts for the missing participants because they lacked signature cards for them.
But thanks to a new federal program - created under a 1994 federal law and put into place last year - Austin and several hundred other employers have been able to terminate their pension plans while shifting the responsibility for finding so-called missing participants to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
In all, 351 employers terminating pension plans with missing participants have given the PBGC $4.2 million. The PBGC as of last month has paid about $320,000 to 210 participants it has located.
"The PBGC program solved our missing participant problem and allowed us to terminate our pension plan. Otherwise, we would have a real problem getting banks to set up accounts or insurers to sell annuities at a reasonable price for such small amounts," said Ms. Bayless.
Indeed, the PBGC's pension search program is drawing raves from benefit consultants who have worked with employers on pension plan terminations.
"This is a very good effort by the PBGC. This program is a winner," said Dick Joss, a resource actuary with Watson Wyatt Worldwide in Bethesda, Md.
"On balance, this is a heck of an improvement over the old way. This is a nice legal way of taking care of a handful of people that you don't want to fool with," said Colin England, a managing consultant with A. Foster Higgins & Co. Inc. in Washington.
The PBGC's pension search program is a congressional response to a problem that for years had dogged employers terminating fully funded pension plans. Federal law requires employers to locate and pay promised benefits to participants before the plans can be terminated.
For most pension plan participants, this requirement is not a problem. Employers typically know where vested employees live. Similarly, employers paying pension benefits to retirees have their addresses.
Problems emerge, though, when dealing with so-called deferred vested participants - those employees who left the company with a vested benefit but who were not yet eligible to begin receiving benefits, typically because they had not reached the plan's normal retirement age.
Often, those individuals move and don't supply their former employers with their new addresses.
"This is a very common situation with individuals who leave a company in their 30s and 40s. They haven't kept the company's benefits department informed of where they live," said Mr. England of Foster Higgins.
The PBGC's missing participant program gives employers terminating pension plans another option: they can simply transfer money for the missing participant's benefit to the PBGC (after conducting a diligent search for the missing participants) and the federal agency will pay the benefit when the individual is located. It then is up to the PBGC to find the missing participants.
