Benefits & ERISA Law

Adam and John on the Obligations of Reasonableness and the Problems with SPDs, Respectively

Well, geez, I am embarrassed by the awkward silence in this space over the past couple of weeks. I was out of the country on business for a bit, and digging out ever since. Not that I ever lost sight of the ball, though, as I kept jotting down stories and developments that I wanted to pass along in a blog post. I am going to do that right now, clearing my desk of two of them.

In the first one, I had wanted to pass along this excellent and thought provoking post from Adam Pozek's Pozek on Pensions, in which he discusses the regulatory changes being developed by the Department of Labor related to who is a fiduciary and what information has to be disclosed to and by fiduciaries. Adam makes the point that what should not be lost in these developments, and in the controversies the changes engender – see here, for instance – is that they do not change the actual obligations of plan fiduciaries to act reasonably and conduct appropriate investigation; those obligations have always been there and continue to be there. The only thing that is changing is what information is available as part of that obligation and how it may impact a fiduciary's compliance with that obligation. I have discussed before that the disclosure of further information through this regulatory structure will almost certainly shift the nature of fiduciary liability and litigation, and affect how such claims are structured and how they are defended. They don't, however, change the fundamental, underlying legal obligation of fiduciaries, a point Adam drives home in his post and which, perhaps implicitly, he is reminding us of as we get lost in the details of these regulatory changes.

The second item I had wanted to highlight was this blog, by John Lowell of Cassidy Retirement Group, titled – in a walking, talking exemplar of transparency - Benefits and Compensation with John Lowell. John's experience shines through in his posts, which are detailed, thought provoking and frankly, compared to much of what one finds on blogs, highly original. For my purposes, and for any of the rest of us waiting for the Supreme Court to rule in Amara, I particularly liked his real world discussion of the problem of misleading and inaccurate summary plan descriptions, which you can find here.
 

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on March 07, 2011 (boomark / email).