Do you need to find missing participants?
Yes, you absolutely do.
The real question is: How do you find missing participants?
The Department of Labor (DOL) outlines plan sponsor responsibilities in their 2021 best practices. This guidance clarifies that the plan sponsor is responsible for communicating with all plan participants and identifying and locating missing participants. However, the DOL did not outline a process for finding these missing participants. Instead, the DOL’s guidance only suggests that plan sponsors should utilize national location searches and available public databases.
Thankfully, plan sponsors have a broad array of solutions available to help them find missing people. Plan sponsors and the plan committee should develop a documented process and consistently follow it in order to locate any “lost” participants. These documented procedures should outline a method that escalates attempts to find a lost participant, with each step requiring a more detailed search in order to locate hard-to-find participants.
Following are examples of the steps you could take to locate missing participants.
Step One – After identifying that a participant is missing, attempt to locate them by contacting them using all information they provided on any of their new-hire paperwork, including legal and tax forms.
Step Two – Request any additional contact information from coworkers who may have updated information on the participant.
Step Three – Contact any emergency contacts or beneficiaries the participant may have listed on employment onboarding forms.
Step Four – Google the participant’s name, identify potential matches and re-check to verify whether any of them are correct.
Step Five – Conduct an online obituary search to verify that the participant has not passed away.
Step Six – Contact a skip tracing firm that could run the participant’s Social Security number through the Credit Bureau to see if they have any updated information you can use to contact the person.
Step Seven – Hire a private investigator to locate the person.
This is just an example of an outline policy you could execute and document to show your diligence in attempting to locate any lost participant. Additionally, you can outsource solutions that can provide some or all of this work for you. However, these outsourcing solutions come with associated costs you would be responsible for paying.
As a plan sponsor, it’s your responsibility to locate missing participants and provide a documented procedure the DOL, IRS, or any litigating attorney could follow if they ever investigated the plan.
Please contact us if you’re interested in learning how Plan Notice can accept the responsibilities related to locating missing participants. Plan Notice has developed proprietary software and an audit process that allows us to identify missing participants and locate them, per the DOL’s guidelines. In addition, we provide the plan sponsor with a detailed, auditable log showing that all required work has been completed and that all reasonable efforts have been made. Finally, when you engage Plan Notice, we don’t only accept the work responsibilities; we also indemnify your plan against any fines or fees related to the missing participant requirements.
