AT&T sics collections on retirees to recoup pension overpayments

AT&T made some mistakes in calculating pension benefits for some of its own workers.

But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, it didn’t attempt to correct its mistakes until years later, when those pension benefits had long since been paid and spent. So it’s turned loose the dogs of collection on its own retirees.

We’re not talking about small amounts of money, either, that might be within a retiree’s ability to repay—one retiree received a letter asking for more than $32,000 (he was contacted by a collection agency within weeks of telling AT&T that he couldn’t repay it), while another was targeted for more than $58,000 and a third more than $45,000.

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Add in bouts with cancer or heart trouble, age that preempts a high-earning return to the workforce and choices made on the basis of figures provided by the company itself, and these people are facing stress at a time in their lives when there’s really not much of an alternative but to seek help in challenging such demands.

WSJ says the overpayments could potentially affect hundreds of former employees. If letters demanding the return of the money don’t work, they call in a collection agency. And the collection agency, according to retirees, is pretty persistent.

So 17 of AT&T’s retirees have called in some help of their own: the Pension Rights Center, a retiree-advocacy nonprofit in Washington, D.C., or related groups elsewhere in the country.

Fidelity Investments is the pension plan’s recordkeeper and, according to WSJ, a Fidelity spokesman says the firm “helped zero in on errors at AT&T’s direction, including some predating Fidelity’s role.”

Roger Curme, a lawyer with the South Central Pension Rights Project, a legal-assistance service funded in part by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is quoted in the report saying of the collection agency tactics, “We haven’t seen that before. These tactics that AT&T is using…they’re kind of harsh.”

While in general it’s legal to ask for the money back, the Fidelity spokesman told WSJ, “Not recouping the monies would mean that there would be fewer funds available for distribution to other participants.” In fact, those experts call attention to Internal Revenue Service guidance suggesting that “plans had to pursue repayments vigorously or risk losing key tax benefits, such as deductions for employer contributions and tax-free investment returns.”

But that doesn’t help the retirees with no way to repay. Jay Kuhnie, president of the National Chrysler Retirement Organization, a retiree-advocacy group, says in the report that some retirees might have changed plans on where to move or when to retire had they known the accurate figures. He’s quoted saying, “They might have said, that’s not as much as I thought, I’m going to work another 4 to 5 years. The retiree has no way of going back.”

And when retirees complained as far back as 2015,Treasury Department and IRS officials issued new guidance, “clarifying that plans could recover funds in other ways instead, including from contractors responsible for errors. Companies could also replace the missing funds themselves, or modify plan rules retroactively to accommodate the overpayments, according to the guidance.”

“It clarified that plan sponsors were not always required to recoup inadvertent overpayments and pursue all available legal remedies to do so,” Mark Iwry, a Treasury Department official from 2009 to 2017 who worked on retirement policy, told WSJ. That new guidance “took a step toward making the system more practical, workable, and humane.”