Help Me Help You: Fine-Tuning Your Benefit Claims Process

All ERISA plans are required to have reasonable procedures for filing benefit claims. A claim for benefits can consist simply of a participant’s request for a plan benefit. So plans should have procedures for handling benefit claims. This includes notifying the plan administrator or other claims fiduciary of the request, involving counsel where needed, and notifying an insurer, where it’s an insured benefit, or an actuary or the plan recordkeeper. This process map illustrates how to handle a claim under an ERISA pension plan. See if your plan process complies.

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Practical Guidance continuously adds new documents and analyses to Market Standards—Employment Agreements, our searchable database of publicly-filed employment agreements enabling users to search, compare, and analyze over 5,900 employment agreements using approximately 75 detailed deal points to filter search results. The links below will take you to the Agreement Information/Agreement page for just a few of the recently added agreements, where you can see a summary of the deal points and view the underlying document. For more information on Market Standards—Employment Agreements, click here.

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Practical Guidance Updates
Featuring the latest updates from your Practical Guidance account.  

• Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Key Legal Developments Tracker
  Stay informed on new developments.
  • ERISA. DOL issues guidance through EBSA addressing when a qualified public accountant that examines an employee benefit plan’s financial statements (as applicable) is independent for purposes of rendering an opinion on the financial statements. DOL Interpretive Bulletin 2022-01, 87 Fed. Reg. 54368 (Sept. 6, 2022).
  • Legislative Developments. The U.S. Senate Finance Committee released the legislative text of the Enhancing American Retirement Now (EARN) Act, after the measure was favorably reported in a committee markup. Section-by-section summary of the bill.
  • Health and Welfare Benefits. Plan sponsors offering prescription drug coverage must provide notices of creditable or non-creditable coverage to Medicare-enrolled individuals before each year’s Medicare Part D annual enrollment period—this year, by October 14. The notice obligation should be provided to retirees and their dependents, Medicare-enrolled active employees and their dependents, and Medicare-enrolled COBRA participants and their dependents.
• Document alerts allow you to stay current on legal developments that affect your practice. Find out how to set up your document alerts.
• Listen up! Access our growing collection of podcasts by navigating to the Practical Guidance Podcasts Resource Kit.
• The Practical Guidance Journal Fall Edition features impacts of the Dobbs v. Jackson Health Organization decision on employers, healthcare, insurance, and privacy concerns, and tracks the status of state law changes.
• Check out the new Practical Guidance Author Center! Learn about the 1500+ leading attorney authors contributing to our 21 practice areas, and find out how you can Become a Practical Guidance Author.
• Share the First Year Associate Resource Kit: Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation with your firm’s associates to help them sharpen their research and writing skills, get the inside scoop on associate survival, and hit the ground running.

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