Government to Expand Search for Pensioners

The government’s pension insurance agency expects to begin looking for about 1,000 people next year who it believes will be due benefits from newly terminated pension plans.

The Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp. said Wednesday that about 4,000 fully funded plans are ended each year and about 1,000 retirees due benefits subsequently cannot be found.

The PBGC is already responsible for locating people in plans that terminate without sufficient assets to pay benefits, which are assigned to the agency for payment.

Beginning in 1996, the new program will extend the agency’s search efforts to people missing from fully funded plans that are terminated.

“This new program will be a boon for people who are owed pensions but may not know it,” said Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, the PBGC board chairman.

Currently, a company ending a fully funded plan often deposits benefits for missing beneficiaries in financial institutions such as banks or buys annuities from insurance companies.

Under the new program, the benefits will be deposited with the PBGC, which will conduct repeated, periodic searches of Social Security and other records in its efforts to find the missing beneficiaries.