Transamerica Retirement Solutions has been sued in its role as a retirement plan administrator by a participant in a company retirement plan for allegedly failing to guard against identity theft due to a data breach.
The participant's former employer wasn't identified in the case of Eric Giannini vs. Transamerica Retirement Solutions LLC, filed Dec. 3 in a U.S. District Court in White Plains, N.Y. The type of retirement plan wasn't identified in the complaint.
"Plaintiff has experienced a number of harms as a result of the data breach incident," said the complaint referring to a data breach that occurred "in our around" June 2021. The plaintiff said the breach caused "misuse of his identifying information for fraudulent purposes."
He sued Transamerica, whose headquarters is in Harrison, N.Y., for violating provisions of the New York General Business Law as well as several California privacy and business records laws. Mr. Giannini is a resident of Sacramento, Calif.
"The allegations in the lawsuit are inaccurate and misleading," Hank Williams, a Transamerica spokesman, wrote in an email Wednesday.
"At no time did unauthorized individuals gain access to Transamerica's systems as the lawsuit suggests," he wrote. "The allegations that Transamerica failed to meet legal or regulatory obligations are false."
Mr. Giannini's complaint, which is seeking class-action status, accused Transamerica of taking four months to alert retirement plan participants after the breach had been detected. "As a result, (the) plaintiff and other class members will continue to experience various types of misuse" of their private information, the lawsuit said.
"The breach occurred because (the) defendant failed to take reasonable measures to protect personal identifiable information it collected and stored," the lawsuit added.
