Find a Missing Participant:
A Comprehensive Solution to Managing 401k Accounts
Do you need to find a missing participant in your company’s 401k plan?
If your company sponsors a contribution plan for its employees, whether that plan is a 401k, profit sharing, an individual retirement account (IRA) or anything else, distributing assets to plan participants is a critical function of managing that plan.
Need Retirement Plan Management Help?
Call us today at - 267.607.4169
While finding a participant whose plan has been terminated can sometimes be as simple as placing a phone call or mailing a certified letter, many plan sponsors can have a difficult time finding other participants for a number of reasons.
These reasons can include:
- A name change – If a program participant changes his or her legal name without notifying you, finding them in order to distribute funds from a terminated account can prove to be difficult.
- A change of address – If someone no longer participates in your company’s plan, and subsequently changes his or her home address, that participant may neglect to inform you of the change of address. Any correspondence that you send regarding the account would then be sent back to you.
- The participant disappears – Trying to find a missing participant under this circumstance may be more difficult than under any other circumstance.
When this happens, you lose contact with the individual and all efforts to get in touch prove fruitless.
Regardless of the reason why the program participant has become difficult to find, your responsibility is to locate them and ensure that the accumulated funds are properly dispersed.
Failure to do so means that you have to continue to pay money to maintain the account until the person’s been found and their money has been sent to them.
If you need help to find missing participants who hold retirement plans through your company but have gone missing for one reason or another, then you need the help of professionals who specialize in finding missing participants.
You need RCP Solutions.
Finding Owners of Lost Accounts
Until you manage to track down the individual to whom an account belongs, the burden of maintaining that account falls on you.
There are several different methods that you can take in your approach to finding lost 401k account owners.
Some of these methods can include:
- Checking plan records against others – While the person you are looking for did not update all of the information tied to his or her retirement plan, that may not hold true for other plans.
Check your company’s insurance records, payroll, or other accounts to see if any of the recorded information is different from what the retirement account in question states.
- Check with beneficiaries – When someone opens a retirement account, they have to name beneficiaries to the assets within the account.
If you fail to find a participant then you can contact the beneficiary on that person’s account in an effort to locate them. If, through the beneficiary, you learn that death is the reason that you have lost track of the participant, then you can begin the process of distributing the funds to that beneficiary.
- Contact the IRS – The Internal Revenue Service offers a service by which it will forward a letter that you provide to an individual’s last known address based on his or her social security number.
The downside to using this method to find a missing participant is that the IRS, by law, cannot provide you with the updated information, nor can they tell you the result of inquiry.
That means that if the IRS sends a letter on your behalf and that letter is determined to be undeliverable, you have no way of finding that out. Letters that are returned to the IRS as undeliverable are destroyed.
Many times, the methods described above aren’t enough to locate someone who has funds from a retirement account due to be distributed to them.
When this is the case, we can help you find missing participants.
With our help, you can give them their accrued money, close the retirement account, and move on with your company’s business practices.
Let RCP Solutions Do the Work for You
As a company that provides you with risk management solutions related to organizing and overseeing the retirement plans that your company offers, we have the resources and expertise to find missing participants and come to a solution that all parties involved will benefit from.
Let us take care of settling terminated 401k accounts so that you can focus on mission critical operations.
If you’re ready for us to help you, then you can get in touch with us today by calling 267.607.4120 or clicking here to contact one of our representatives.
Go from Find a Missing Participant Back to 401k Termination
Go back to the RCP Solutions Homepage
