How can we find missing beneficiaries (life insurance and defined bene

[Guest B Husani]

How can we find missing beneficiaries (life insurance and defined benefit pension) for whom we do not have social security numbers?

What is our obligation to do so? If we have made a reasonable effort,(And what constitutes a reasonable effort? Do we need to hire a locator firm? Can they locate someone without a social security number?) what then? Do we turn the money (in the case of pension) over to the PBGC? Will the PBGC try to locate them?

[david rigby]

There have been several discussion threads on this topic. Try a search of the message boards.

[Guest B Husani]

Thanks PAX, I thought you'd reply. I saw many of your messages when I reviewed the message boards and did a search(using the word "missing") yesterday. I printed all of the references to missing participants (nothing was said about missing beneficiaries for whom employers are more likely to have no ss#) but nothing really answered my questions:

1) What obligations (under what regulation) does an employer have to find missing beneficiaries/participants for a non-terminated DB plan? Especially in the case of beneficiaries, who do not have a clue that they are entitled to anything, what does the law say we need to do?

2)One of the previous messages mentioned keeping a good record of the correspondence you sent to the participant. But what if that correspondence was returned in the mail? That would mean the participant (or beneficiary) never received the notification.

3)In one of the previous messages, you said that Lexis-Nexis would not be good enough. What about something like 1800USSEARCH? I am trying it out on one of our missing beneficiaries. (By the way, I located former neighbors of the beneficiary through reverse lookup in an internet white pages search site, and I've written to about 12 or 14 of them, providing them with stamped, self-addressed return envelopes. I received two answers but they led to dead ends.)

[david rigby]

Ouch, you have a difficult problem. The generic answer is to use search service, or the IRS forwarding program, or the commercial locator services, etc. But you have problem if you don't have SSn and if the beneficiary does not have any knowledge of the possible benefit.

The only other thing that comes to mind is an intenet search by name. SSN probably would not do any good there anyway.