Plan Document Provisions

[Guest ircreader]

Our company has a rather lengthy Article in its Health Care Plan Document regarding the years of service that will be credited to employees of acquired companies. There is a concern that our plan document is becoming too lengthy (over 100 pages). Every time we restate the plan, we include all the sections of the Article dealing with service credit for employees of acquired companies. Our concern is that if an employee leaves an acquired company and becomes an employee of the acquiring company, he or she will assert that service credit should be measured based upon the acquiring company's service credit rules. We have several Health Care Plans. If the provisions are fully excuted, we are wondering if they have to be restated over and over again. My concern is that any employee who requests a copy of the plan document would not have knowledge of the provisions unless we restate them. As far as I am concerned, I think it is better to have a longer Plan Document and not risk having an employee be less than fully informed.

Any thoughts?

[mroberts]

Why not just have the service credit section as an endorsement and keep it on file for the employees to peruse if they want? This way, it will keep the plan document to a reasonable length.

My thought is that the longer the plan document, the less likely an employee is going to read it. I'm a staunch believer in educating your employees as much as possible and if you give them a plan document that deters them from looking at it, the less educated they are going to be.

Playing devil's advocate, you could always include the service credit section at the very end of the plan document so that employees who are not concerned about those provisions need not have to weed through them.

Email me if you would like to discuss further.

[Kirk Maldonado]

Why not put all of those rules in Appendices in the back of the document.

You could even simplify things more if you did a separate Appendix for each acquisition, and name the appendix for the name of the target company.