The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has requested that Congress allocate $5 million and 22 full-time employees in its 2024 budget to create a program to locate missing retirement plan participants. In fiscal year 2021, the Employee Benefits Security Administration (EBSA) recovered more than $1.5 billion in lost benefits for over 16,000 elderly retirees and their beneficiaries after their retirement plans lost track of them. The program’s focus is to bring economic equity to financially vulnerable individuals.
While investigating the whereabouts of these “missing” retirement plan participants, EBSA developed some best practices for employers to follow to minimize the incidence of missing or nonresponsive plan participants. These best practices include the following:
- Making periodic contact with current and retired plan beneficiaries;
- Including contact change requests in plan communications;
- Flagging undeliverable mail and email for follow-up efforts;
- Using easy-to-understand language in all communications;
- Offering assistance for non-English speaking plan participants;
- Providing information about how participants can consolidate plans from previous employers;
- Clearly articulating any changes in plan names and sponsors;
- Making efforts to search for missing participants by contacting beneficiaries, searching public databases, and utilizing pension registries; and
- Documenting efforts to locate missing participants.
