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Employee communications — Benefits

One of Congress’s principal goals in adopting the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) was to create the circumstances under which employees would be well enough informed about the operation of their employer’s benefit programs and about their entitlement to benefits that they would be able to enforce their rights under ERISA and the benefit plan documents. To promote this goal, ERISA requires that plan participants and beneficiaries be provided with specific types of information about the terms and the operation of the employer’s plans, usually in the form of written disclosures and/or access to certain documents.

The duty to provide some forms of written information arises automatically, while the duty to provide other forms of information (or to allow the participant access to documents) arises only on the occurrence of specified events (including, most significantly, a request by a plan participant or beneficiary). Almost all of the specific written disclosure duties set forth in ERISA fall on the plan administrator, rather than on the employer in its capacity as the plan sponsor.           

However, as the result of a trend in judicial decisions under ERISA’s fiduciary provisions, both the plan administrator and the employer have disclosure duties that...


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