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Supreme Court favors CIGNA in summary plan description case

The U.S. Supreme Court has significantly narrowed the grounds an employee can use to sue for additional pension benefits based on errors in a plan’s summary plan description (SPD).

By Arthur D. Postal | Updated on May 17, 2011

WASHINGTON BUREAU — The U.S. Supreme Court has significantly narrowed the grounds an employee can use to sue for additional pension benefits based on errors in a plan’s summary plan description (SPD).

An SPD should be accurate, but it need not be as complete as the underlying plan documents, and participants cannot sue to enforce their interpretation of the SPD in the same way that they could sue to enforce the actual terms of the plan, the court has held in an 8-0 ruling in CIGNA Corp. v. Amara, No. 09-804.

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