Benefits & ERISA Law

Marx on 401(k) Litigation

I have a stack of substantive ERISA matters that I have been trying to post on for the last week or two, and I am going to try to work through them over the next few weeks. The thing about a blog, though, is the world keeps on spinning, and each day you find something new you want to post on, which keeps shunting those older items further into the background. That's happened again today.

Regular readers know I am fond of the saying that Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but he was right that everything is economics. It is economic reality that is driving the increase in ERISA litigation, both at the big ticket class action level and at the micro level of individual participant claims; as I often say, the same compliance errors or high plan fees that participants ignored while their account balances were just going up, up, up, are being sued over, now that account balances have spent a year or more going down, down, down (yes, I know, I am not accounting for recent upticks, but you get my drift). Along this line, fiduciary liability insurance expert and fellow blogger, Joe Curley of U.S. Reinsurance, and I were discussing a couple days ago the ticking time bomb posed by the impending retirement - for the first time - of a generation of employees devoid of pensions and forced to rely instead on their 401(k) plans. It is conventional wisdom and common knowledge that these retirees are not, as a class, financially prepared for retirement by the assets in those accounts, particularly after the recent market downturn. Those people are not going to go quietly into decades of financial struggle in retirement, if there is a target for complaints about the operation, returns, or anything else concerning their 401(k) plans who can be sued; they make for a nice big pool of potential class action representatives, a huge pool of potential class members, and gazillions of potential individual claimants, for the latter of whom even a relatively small recovery will be significant relative to the values of their accounts. On a practical, day in and day out level, this means two things for plan sponsors, named fiduciaries or functional (who are often simply accidental) fiduciaries. One is to make sure there is sufficient fiduciary liability insurance in place; as Joe noted when we spoke, some service providers and others who may become functional fiduciaries by their roles in company 401(k) plans are not aware of that risk, and are not necessarily prepared for it. The second is an old hobby horse of this blog - compliance, compliance, compliance. ERISA litigation, particularly breach of fiduciary duty litigation, is an area of the law where a good defense is always the best offense - watch the fees, watch the operational compliance, document a sound practice for selecting investment options, etc. A fiduciary who does that severely decreases the likelihood of being sued, and strongly increases the likelihood of not being found liable if suit is filed.

This is on my mind today particularly because of this article from the Wall Street Journal about unemployed workers in the age 55 to 64 bracket who cannot find work and are, for all intents and purposes, being forced to retire, long before they intended to and long before they are financially prepared to do so. These people - or at least the lawyers they go to - are not going to overlook problems in their retirement accounts, even if they are just arguable or comparably minor or, as is often the case, were things that no one paid attention to years ago, like fees and costs. And this is where we loop back around to the Marx quote - there may be nothing different about the operational aspects of these 401(k) plans then there ever were, but the economic forces that are driving these people into retirement are going to likewise drive them to pursue any opportunity to bolster the returns on their accounts, even if that is by suing those who ran the plans.

Full post as published by Boston ERISA Law Blog on December 14, 2009 (boomark / email).