Locating Missing or Deceased Participants of a Plan - Locator Services

Currently working on putting together a good listing to locator services in finding missing or deceased terminated vested employees under a plan to keep a more revised and updated copy at my disposal. Some clients currently working with have participants that left and may not have been able to keep in contact with. Using PeoplesFinder.com, EmployeeLocator.com and Legacy.com but want to see if there are others out there that someone might recommend and would be deemed compliant with the DOL/IRS? 

We use a TransUnion service - with pretty good success.  For the tough ones, including those deceased, we use a variety of techniques - including calling the coroner in the county of last residence to ask who claimed the body!  Surprisingly, most of the coroners are more than happy to help (apparently carrying on a real "live" conversation is something they appreciate!)

I suggest working with a selection service providers to balance cost and effort to finding missing participants.  For example, EmployeeLocator.com has a very high success rate at a very low cost if you have and are willing to provide the SSN.  (Check you PII policies.) 

At the other end of the spectrum are private investigators which often charge an hourly rate.  They tend to be more successful working within the likely geographic area of the last know whereabouts of the participant, and are much more expensive.

I have found using a combination of search sources - BeenVerified, TruthFinder, Google... - helps build a dossier which then can lead to a more focused search.  For example, one participant died in a car accident.  Having found an individual with a very similar name and with the same birth date lead to a news article about the accident which then lead to finding next of kin. 

Typically, if you can find the county in which a death occurred, the coroner will readily work with a plan but is less likely to work with an individual seeking information.

In another example, it turned out that a former co-worker of the participant was named as a beneficiary on an insurance policy.  The company had enough information about the former co-worker and when contacted, the co-worker provided enough information to be able to find the participant.

The stories that emerge from some of the searches are amazing!

If you have SSN information, we suggest Life Status 360 for an affordable option for address searches. They have an address search, SSN death records search and obituary search options. 

We like them for our DB plans as we upload a file to them once a year and we receive daily reports of anyone that shows up in a state death report or an obituary.  The records are then run through the Social Security Death Index and several other death index databases whenever they are updated.  We oftentimes find out that someone is deceased before a family member contacts us.  It really helps to keep our DB records up to date.

We also use CLEAR from Thompson Reuters, but that is a more expensive option, but allows you to do next of kin searches.  However, you don't necessarily need a SSN to search there, but it does help, especially if you have a common name.