The Hard Truth on Pension Participant Data Management & How to Set Your Plan Up for Success

Pension plans have no idea how inaccurate or out-of-date their participant data is and it is costing them millions every year. 

Even with a robust and experienced internal team maintaining and updating participant data, it is nearly impossible to keep participant information accurate and up-to-date. Participants will be missing. There are a variety of reasons so many organizations struggle with bad data including the lack of a comprehensive data source, staffing issues, the lack of a documented process, and security concerns.  

Is there room for improvement in your participant data? 

Chances are, yes. This is no fault of the pension plan administrative staff. Gathering data on pension participants is extremely complex – requiring massive amounts of resources, skills, and time.  

We have found: 

• Approximately 33% of the addresses pension plans have on file are inaccurate. This is likely due to 1 in 8 Americans changing their address every year. 
• Pension plans typically have stacks of returned mail at some or all times of the year that takes critical time and resources to manage. Our CertiCensus clients only have a small percentage of returned mail, around 0.1%, that PBI manages on their behalf. 
• If pension plans are not using CertiDeath, they are missing at least 38% of deaths – even with using other death matching services. CertiDeath identifies and validates 96.5% of deaths using 26,000+ data sources, proprietary algorithms, and human expertise. 
• Over $1 billion is sent every year to deceased pension plan participants. PBI has helped clients uncover over $1 billion in overpayments. 
• Data sources can be extremely inaccurate. For example, the SSA DMF only reports 16% of deaths and has a false positive in every 211 deaths reported. PBI’s CertiDeath only has one false positive in every 3,000 deaths and has 99.9% accuracy with a 75 million record obituary database. 

How to get the most accurate pension participant data. 

Your pension management team simply cannot do it all. This is why we have developed the industry’s two leading pension administrative services: CertiCensus and CertiDeath. These on-going services keep your participant data as updated as possible. 

Products built for full population management.  

CertiCensus: Proactive pension participant management  

CertiCensus is an entire population management solution. It keeps your participant database accurate with continuous monitoring and reporting. Your pension population is always audit-ready. Missing participants are located through various methods including First Class Mail, phone calls, decedents are verified, beneficiaries are found, and comprehensive audit reports are ready with the click of a button from the online portal. CertiCensus gives you the confidence you are aligned with the Department of Labor (DOL) guidance and the recommendations of the IRS.   

CertiDeath: The industry’s only death audit solution. 

CertiDeath provides on-going monitoring where you are notified as soon as a decedent is verified. Every day CertiDeath scans over 26,000 data sources, makes matches using our proprietary scoring system, our team of experts validate each match, and results are sent to our clients. Ask us for a free CertiDeath Analysis to see how much we could save you. 

There is no time like the present! 

The more time you wait to correct bad participant data, the more it costs your pension plan. Take the first step today and contact our team. We would like to learn about your pension plan and see if CertiCensus or CertiDeath makes sense for you.