Press Release

UAS Actuarial and Consulting Services to Go PII/PHI Free

Issued by United Actuarial Services, Inc.

June 2, 2022

United Actuarial Services, Inc. (“UAS”) is pleased to announce a company-wide commitment to transition away from collecting and maintaining personally identifiable information (“PII”) and HIPAA protected health information (“PHI”) in the performance of providing actuarial and consulting services to our multiemployer pension and health plan clients. As a multiemployer plan service provider, the most sensitive and high risk data we come in contact with is the PII/PHI of the plan participants of clients we support. The liability to safely and securely collect, use and store that data requires UAS to employ a host of ever-expanding data security and training measures, driving increased costs to perform and insure our engaged services. While such safeguarding measures will continue, UAS has adopted an overarching philosophy that the best defense is not needing one. Said another way, UAS is moving away from using PII/PHI.

Next Steps

This transition will leverage use of “unique participant identifiers,” typically assigned by a plan administrator, avoiding use of participant Social Security numbers, names or any other confidential data fields that are not absolutely necessary to perform our engaged services. The final result means the client data files collected and maintained by UAS will have minimal street value to cyber criminals, providing assurance to our plan trustees that the safety and integrity of the participant data they are entrusted to protect as fiduciaries is maintained by UAS to the highest standards.

For this transition to be successful, UAS will be working in close partnership with our client trustees, administrators and attorneys. We will be sensitive to the reality that plan administrators and various other plan service providers will be directly affected (i.e., disrupted) to support the important changes necessary to operational procedures to accommodate plan service providers like UAS delivering fully PII/PHIfree services. UAS appreciates our plan trustees joining in this push towards the common valuable cause, which ultimately benefits the plan sponsors and participants whose benefits and confidentiality we are all striving to maintain and protect.

UAS will be sharing frequent updates with our actuarial and consulting clients and plan professionals as we move ahead through this transition, and are proud to be among the most data secure actuarial consulting firms in the United States.

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