It's a very tricky system to figure out, which is why the National Center for Retirement Benefits, a company in Northbrook, Illinois, has done a booming business in sleuthing through pension plans to discover errors that would have resulted in employees and employees' beneficiaries missing out on money that was due them. The NCRB charges you only if its investigation results in a larger sum of money for you; then they charge 20% of the amount they recover. Among the errors the company has found, according to their Web site:
·The plan calls for all compensation to be used in determining your retirement benefits, but bonuses and overtime were deleted from the computer run, resulting in a portion of the contributions and benefits that should have been accumulated for you being unpaid.
·The administrators of a profit-sharing plan have valued the account on the basis of the fair market value of the assets at the beginning of the year, instead of at the end of the year, when the stock market increased substantially.
·The administrators have used the wrong years of service for your spouse in determining your benefits.
·The wrong computer disk is being used to update files. Your current benefit statement reflects the same information that was on your benefit statement four years ago!
Check out dozens of other potential errors on the company's Web site, www.ncrb.com
.
