The per-participant flat premium rate for plan years beginning in 2019 is $80 per participant for single-employer DB plans; the variable-rate premium is $43 per $1,000 of unfunded
vested benefits, capped at $541 times the number of participants.
Because plaintiff is "[a] former employee who has neither a reasonable expectation of returning to covered employment nor a colorable claim to
vested benefits," he is not a participant under ERISA, and his claims are not preempted.
Unisys Corporation (NYSE: UIS) has completed a lump-sum offer for eligible former associates who have deferred
vested benefits under the company's US pension plan to receive the value of their entire pension benefit in a lump-sum payment.
First, many firms have offered buyouts to terminated employees with
vested benefits. Those individuals no longer accrue benefits, so their cost is not growing, but removing them from the rolls makes life simpler for the human resources (HR) department.
This means that
vested benefits for participants can be reduced as necessary to avoid insolvency (taking into account any partition), as long as the reduction keeps benefits at no less than 110 percent of the PBGC guaranteed rate for multiemployer plans.
For many multiemployer plans, the result has been inversion of the pyramid: fewer dollars flowing in from fewer employers and for fewer active employees, while the number of individuals having
vested benefits for themselves and their spouses swells.
Under applicable ERISA provisions, stopping contributions was deemed a withdrawal from the Teamsters Fund, in which case Scott Brass became liable for its proportionate share of the Teamsters Fund's unfunded
vested benefits, totaling approximately $4.5 million.
In this rare scenario, a CASD SERP will typically deny the executive all
vested benefits and make the credit union the sole owner of the policy.
* Calculating a plan's unfunded
vested benefits under the PBGC variable-rate premium rules; and
The Retirement Equity Act was passed due to the "inequitable" possibility that the surviving spouse would receive "no survivor benefits under the plan even though the participant had accrued significant
vested benefits before death."iv The concern of Congress was even more acute when the spouse was a homemaker without assets of his or her own.v To remedy this, Congress required all defined benefit plans, and most defined contribution plans, to provide a default payout option of a Qualified Joint and Survivor Annuity (QJSA).
In general, the rules are designed to allocate all of a plan's unfunded
vested benefits among the employers responsible for contributing to the plan based on each employer's share of the plan's contributions.