Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin filed a complaint against MetLife over its failure to pay the pensions of hundreds of the state’s retirees.
Galvin is accusing the company of “making misleading statements” in connection with the neglected pension payments, which are owed to retired workers who MetLife “wrongly designated as ‘presumed dead’” in its system.
The Securities Division of Galvin’s office began investigating MetLife last December, when the company admitted they’d acquired pension obligations from employers but subsequently lost track of tens of thousands of plan participants.
The securities attorneys’ complaint explained that MetLife’s procedure to notify pensioners when their accounts were initially transferred to the company fell short of its responsibility. Two letters were sent to each plan participant within a span of five years, and if he or she failed to respond to either notice, MetLife concluded the participant had died and therefore made no further attempts to communicate with him or her.
“Once we were notified of these so-called missing pensioners, my first priority was to track down Massachusetts seniors who were owed back pension payments,” Galvin said in a statement. “My office was able to locate a majority of the missing Massachusetts residents within just a few weeks.”
He added that over half of the pensioners still lived at the same addresses that MetLife had on file for them.
“The payments to individual retirees may seem small to MetLife, but for the retired nurses, salesmen, shipbuilders, grocery clerks, and other seniors affected who are living primarily on social security, these payments were significant,” Galvin said.
The complaint further alleges that, when a plan participant was inaccurately designated deceased by MetLife, the money he or she was owed “was no longer held in reserve by the company and became assets,” inflating its bottom line.
“MetLife has an obligation to provide truthful statements in its public filings. They did not,” Galvin said. “Shareholders and investors were denied the ability to rely on MetLife’s public statements. My action today is based on the misleading statements as to MetLife’s financial condition.”
Jessa Claeys is a writer, editor and graphic designer.
