Boston ERISA Law Blog

This case, out of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, provides a nice little rule of thumb for amending, merging or otherwise altering retirement benefit plans - namely, that it makes it hard to get sued and lose if you make the changes in a way that avoids altering the actual benefit amounts of any given participant. In this case, an employee complained about changes to the company’s retirement plan made as part of a corporate acquisition and about a later change intended to protect other participants’ participation in the plan. The court found that the changes did not violate ERISA’s merger or anti-cutback provisions, as the evidence showed the changes had no adverse impact on the plaintiff’s benefits. In an interesting discussion of the merger and anti-cutback provisions, the court explained that:  

Pursuant to ERISA § 208 and I.R.C. § 414(1), when benefit plans are merged, each plan participant must receive benefits immediately after the merger that are equal to the benefits he would have received had his plan terminated immediately prior to the merger. . . .At its core, this merger rule is a simple one, intended to prevent companies from eliminating an employee's previously accrued benefits when merging one benefit plan with another. . . . Much like the merger rule, the purpose of the anti-cutback provisions of § 204(g)(1) of ERISA is to prevent an employer from "pulling the rug out from under employees" by amending its benefit plan to eliminate or reduce a previously accrued early retirement subsidy. Specifically, the anti-cutback rule provides, with certain exceptions not relevant here, that "[t]he accrued benefit of a participant under a plan may not be decreased by an amendment of the plan." 29 U.S.C. § 1054(g)(1). . . .The Act requires that the merger or amendment of retirement plans does not result in a plan that has the effect of reducing an employee's previously accrued benefits.

The court ruled across the board in favor of the defendant, not just on the merger and anti-cutback counts but on all counts pled by the participant, with the decision driven in large part by the fact that the evidence demonstrated that the changes to the plan did not detrimentally alter the benefits available under the plan to the complaining participant.

The case is Gillis v. SPX Corp. Individual Retirement Plan.