Saving Paper Copy Pays Off for Pension Counseling Project Client
A recent victory by the Trellis Project—Mid America Region demonstrates how important retaining paper copies of plan documents can be.
In this case, John, a 79-year-old former employee of a large corporation, contacted Trellis because he was denied pension benefits. The corporation and its plan said there was no record of his employment — even though John had worked for the company for 12 years and knew he had earned the right to a pension.
Fortunately for John, who left the company in 1978, he had kept a letter in his filing cabinet for 46 years documenting his participation in the corporation’s profit-sharing plan. The decades-old letter would ultimately be instrumental in proving John’s employment with the corporation by listing both his hiring and termination dates and demonstrating the existence of the corporation’s retirement plan.
The Trellis attorney working with John used the letter as a steppingstone to discover the pension he was owed and prove to the plan that he was entitled to those benefits. Thanks to Trellis’s help, John ultimately received a lump sum payment of nearly $14,000.
The Trellis Project—Mid America Region is one of six counseling projects supported by the Administration on Community Living that provide critical assistance to people with retirement benefit problems in 31 states.
Since 1993, the Pension Counseling and Information Program has recovered over $294 million in retirement benefits and assisted more than 70,000 individuals.
The Pension Rights Center, which serves as the Resource Center to the six Pension Counseling Projects, has compiled some of their recent stories, which can be found here.
This publication was supported by the Administration for Community Living (ACL), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $415,000 funded by ACL/HHS and $158,334 funded by non-government source(s). The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by ACL/HHS, or the U.S. Government.
