Employer’s Hand-Delivery Process for Distributing SPDs Was Sufficient Under ERISA
Davis v. AK Steel Corp., 2009 WL 3853608 (W.D. Pa. 2009)
The trial court in this case found that an employer’s SPD hand-delivery process satisfied DOL regulations, which require that the process be reasonably calculated to ensure that recipients receive SPDs and likely to result in full distribution. The employer had denied an employee’s claim for LTD benefits on the grounds that the employee failed to apply within the plan’s required timeframe. The employee sued claiming, among other things, that he never received the plan’s SPD that would have informed him of the application deadline.
In its analysis, the court focused on whether the employer’s method of distribution was “reasonably calculated” to reach employees. The employer’s delivery process involved (1) providing every supervisor enough copies of the SPD for each employee in the supervisor’s department, along with a list of all the employees in the department; (2) instructing supervisors to hand deliver an SPD to each department employee and to check off an employee’s name on the department list when the employee actually received an SPD; and (3) requiring the supervisors to return the list to the employer’s benefits department, which would arrange for SPD delivery in another way if an employee’s name was not checked off. The employee argued that this process was not followed in distributing the SPDs because notations made by the individual responsible for distributing an SPD to the employee did not clearly indicate whether the employee had actually received an SPD. In the court’s view, however, this failure to follow the delivery process did not demonstrate that the process itself was deficient. Accordingly, the court concluded that the employer’s delivery process was reasonably designed to satisfy ERISA’s requirements.
