NCR Corp. has settled a class action lawsuit for almost $48 million. The five former executives and their spouses who filed the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) suit claimed that the software company failed to provide them with lifetime annuity payments, contrary to its promises. The plaintiffs recently asked the court for preliminary approval of the settlement, which would resolve all claims in Hoak et al. v. Ledford et al., Case Number 1:15-cv-03983, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
The roughly $48 million in settlement funds would consist of $43.52 million in damages for former executives and their spouses and beneficiaries who received or were scheduled to receive lump-sum payments from NCR under one of the company’s plans at the time the company terminated that benefit. Another $4.23 million of the settlement would go toward attorneys’ fees.
In November 2015, the former executives filed suit over provisions in various NCR retirement and benefit plans that had promised them monthly or biweekly payments for the remainder of their lives after retirement. Initially, NCR established trusts with independent trustees to administer the plans, but later terminated the nonqualified plans, stopped all annuity payments, and made lump-sum payments to each plan participant. As part of its actions, NCR amended the plans to secretly terminate the trusts and replace the independent trustee with an NCR executive. Once the plans were terminated, NCR stopped paying annuities and discounted the lump sums it paid by its borrowing costs, resulting in substantially lower payments to plan participants. In contrast, NCR’s plan administrator claimed that all plan participants had received the full value of the benefits to which they were entitled, or the current value of their future benefits at the time of plan termination.
The plaintiffs moved for summary judgment on their breach of contract claim, which the federal district court granted in 2024. NCR appealed, and in August 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed the entry of summary judgment for the plaintiffs, finding that the lump-sum payments breached the plans’ terms.
On remand, the only remaining issues were calculating additional amounts owed to class members, determining attorneys’ fees and costs, and issuing notice to the class. In April 2025, the parties advised the court that they had reached a settlement to resolve the suit fully.
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