Case Study: Obituaries Don’t Always Play by the Rules
The First Name That Wasn’t On paper, everything lined up: a Social Security number, a date of birth, even a location that matched one of our client’s participants. The only issue? The name in the obituary didn’t match the one in the client file. The obituary referred to the deceased as “Sifu” which, at a […]
Is your current death audit process providing a false sense of security?
Pension plans and insurance companies have a lot on their plate, so it isn’t uncommon for their death audit process to get overlooked. It may often be seen as checking a box to make sure there’s some form of a death audit process in place. However, not taking a deeper dive into how effective the […]
How missing and inaccurate participant data impacts a death audit
The Death Master File (DMF) data continues to decline each year. In 2023, the DMF only provided 16% of death records. This degradation has caused conducting death audits for pension plans a much more complex task. Death audits now require the aggregation of thousands of data sources, primarily obituaries. Obituaries are a non-uniform data source […]