© 2024 Pension Rights Center. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 2.5 Generic License.
By David Brandolph
I just received a troubling letter from my 401k plan. It said I would no longer receive my plan statements and other important plan notices and disclosure documents in the mail. Instead, the plan would from now on be sending emails telling me to log in to my account on its website (and to establish an account if needed) to view these documents when they become available. Even more disturbing, it told me that my plan-related documents would remain accessible to me online for merely “one year or, if later, when superseded by a subsequent version.”
Hidden near the bottom was the most important part of the letter—instructions on how to preserve my right to paper documents and keep them coming via U.S. mail. I immediately called the number listed in the letter and told the plan representative who answered that I wanted to keep getting my paper notices. I’m urging everyone to seriously consider doing this as well. By acting, you can more easily preserve important papers that prove your rights to a retirement benefit while maintaining the ability to view these documents online.
In its attempt to push people to go paperless, my plan was taking advantage of a relatively new U.S. Labor Department electronic disclosure rule permitting plans to stop mailing notices to streamline their communications and save money. While this rule may benefit plans, it doesn’t have much going for it in terms of plan member perks. In fact, it can be detrimental to both traditional pension plan members and those with individual retirement savings accounts, such as 401ks and 403bs.
Avoiding more paper clutter and saving trees are good things to do, but not at the expense of missing important disclosures, or having your plan records go missing at the very time you need them. To better ensure your financial future, it’s generally wise to keep getting paper copies of important plan documents.
First, if you’re not getting paper copies, it’s very possible, given the volume of emails most of us receive, that you will never see some or all of the notification emails your plan says it will be sending out. Once plans send you a text or email telling you that documents are available on their website, the plan is off the hook—so long as the email or text doesn’t bounce back. Plans aren’t required to make sure you received the message. So, if the email goes to your spam folder, gets buried unread in your inbox, or you simply never read it, you won’t even know to look for the information.
The rule doesn’t require plans to keep documents posted online indefinitely. Plans can erase them from the website after one year or if they are superseded by a newer version, whichever is later. So, if you want to check past benefit statements, or the plan rules in effect when you left your employer, or your plan’s past investments, fees, or finances, you may be out of luck.
Finally, without paper copies of benefit statements and summaries of plan rules, you may be unable to claim your earned benefits at retirement. Lawyers working and volunteering at our regional pension counseling projects tell us that people often arrive with shoeboxes stuffed with retirement disclosures that are decades old. And it’s good that they have these records, since their lawyers say that the historical information in these documents can often be critically important to retirees’ ability to prove their rights to benefits at retirement or, for example, years later when a widow seeks survivor benefits. When important documents can’t be found, retiree’s rights to benefits can and do vanish.
When your plan tells you it’s stopping the mailing of paper statements—or if it already has—it’s time to contact the plan and Just Say No!
