Crediting Service for Rehires with no records of prior employment

[Guest DLD7575]

Question: I am curious as to what other employers do with regard to crediting service for eligibility for rehires when they have incomplete prior employment records?

In a situation where there are a large number of hourly, high turnover employees who were previously excluded from the plan and the employer wants to include these previously excluded employees with a year of service requirement for eligibility, how does an employer comply with the requirement that all rehires receive credit for previous service (when they were properly excluded from participating in the plan) if the employer does not have records of the prior service.

Thanks in advance. Any thoughts on this are greatly appreciated.

[rcline46]

My memory tells me that if they were never eligible, and they had a plan year of under 500 hours after they were terminated, then the prior service can be ignored (if you are using 1000 hours type rule).

If you are using elapsed time for eligibility, it gets very tricky with the service-spanning rules in 1.410(a)-7.