We often hear from organizations that run an annual or semi-annual death audit and think they are doing enough. However, they are likely choosing a path that ends up costing them more in overpayments and time. It’s important to have continuous monitoring of your population and take a proactive approach. Here’s why:
Deaths occur constantly and overpayments can grow exponentially fast.
We see it all the time. An organization does a one-time death audit run within their population, then a participant passes away the next month. If it’s six or twelve months until they run another death audit, this missed death could cost thousands of dollars in overpayments not budgeted for. That’s just for one missed death. Now, multiply that and it adds up fast as unbudgeted money leaving the plan.
One-time-run death audits rely on less data.
The Berwyn Group has comprehensive data and we see it in the results from years of files we have run. It’s true. If you aren’t using CertiDeath, you are missing deaths and likely far more than you realize. Collecting death data is complicated. Read here to learn about the decline of the DMF and why it’s a challenge to source deaths from obituaries. Simply put: one-time-runs for a death audit do not have the updated data a continuous monitoring service like CertiDeath offers.
If you have to validate results, your data is likely already outdated.
Validating the death of a decedent takes time and skill. Plan Administrators have a variety of tasks to manage, so they likely aren’t up to speed on the latest data sources, let alone the time to check the sources they know about. If you aren’t given a complete file that is ready to use, by the time you get the file in that shape, time has passed and as we talked about above, life happens at any given moment.
There is good news! We have a solution that provides continuous death audit monitoring – CertiDeath.
CertiDeath was launched in 2019. In the past 5 years, CertiDeath has helped uncover over $1 billion in overpayments to clients across the country in various industries. Plus, it has released even more in reserves, and it saves our clients countless hours searching and trying to confirm matches. CertiDeath identifies and validates 96.5% of deaths with 99.9% accuracy. Charges are based on 10% of overpayments savings so results are guaranteed. So CertiDeath guarantees a 10x return on investment in the service. How many products do that? Learn more about CertiDeath or let us prove it with a free CertiDeath analysis – just ask us.
