The Employee Benefits Security Administration recovered $1.44 billion in direct payment to plans, participants and beneficiaries in 2023, the regulator announced Tuesday.

In an annual fact sheet summarizing recoveries from enforcement actions and complaint resolutions, EBSA, a division of the Department of Labor, reported that $854.7 million in recovery came from 731 civil investigations, with 505 (or 69%) resulting in monetary resolutions or other corrective actions. Another $444.1 million came from resolving complaints, $61.2 million from recovering abandoned plan assets and $84.5 million from its voluntary fiduciary correction program.

Lisa Gomez

“[The DOL is] doing everything we can to invest in American workers and to prioritize a number of different things,” says Lisa Gomez, assistant secretary of labor and head of EBSA, noting the three pillars of the organization under President Joe Biden as: creating good jobs, enforcing workplace protections and empowering workers and their families to get their benefits. “We are meeting those goals by working on these recoveries and outreach with workers,” she says.

Defined benefit pension plan recoveries for people no longer working for an employer but still entitled to the benefit made up a large portion of funds from investigations. EBSA’s enforcement program assisted 5,690 terminated vested participants in DB plans, collecting $429.2 million in total. The amount represents “lifetime annuity payments or cash-out lump sum balance payments, plus interest on distributions paid as either retroactive lump sums or in actuarially adjusted future annuity amounts,” EBSA noted.

The enforcement program also reported 352 instances of non-monetary relief in civil cases, including barring 41 individuals from serving as fiduciaries, improving missing participant procedures for 44 plans and making 34 corrections involving service providers for health plans covered by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, according to the fact sheet.

EBSA investigations led to indictments of 60 people for crimes related to employee benefit plans, the firm noted. The regulator conducts most criminal charges with other federal law enforcement agencies, with indictments issued for plan officials, corporate officers and service providers.

Speaking Retirement

As an example of specific enforcement activity, the regulator noted that staff recovered more than $230,000 in plan contributions to a population of exclusively Spanish-speaking employees by tracking down participants via phone calls, emails and letters.

“When EBSA told [one participant] we had recovered $31,000 that her husband was owed, she said they had been struggling to pay his health expenses and the recovered funds were a ‘miracle,’” the regulator wrote in the fact sheet.

Gomez says such results are the work of “dogged” and “determined” staff, along with the prioritization of language capabilities.

“Trying to speak retirement and health is like a language in itself,” she says. “It’s very hard for anyone to understand, and then when you couple in not having someone available to speak with you in whatever your comfortable language is, that just makes it even more difficult.”

Gomez also highlighted the $444.1 million in benefits obtained by resolving about 197,000 informal complaints through EBSA’s benefits adviser program. She notes that when an adviser resolves an inbound call or email from the regulator’s “Ask EBSA” website, it not only helps the caller, but it prevents the issue from eventually moving to an investigation, which brings further “red tape” and time.

Another key point of pride at EBSA was improving education and outreach, which Gomez says have improved during her tenure, while noting she is a “cheerleader” for the staffers doing the work.

EBSA logged 2,159 outreach events for workers, retirees, employers, plan officials and member of Congress, 904 of which were for underserved communities, and some of which were conducted in languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole, Polish, Tagalog and Vietnamese. Some of the outreach was geared toward educating employers about ERISA obligations, while others were for dislocated workers facing job loss.

“We are really trying to broaden our reach to all different communities, with a particular focus on underserved communities,” Gomez says. “I’m really excited to see these numbers going up.”

$12.8 Trillion Mandate

Gomez noted the efforts of a department that is “relatively small” when compared to other government agencies. Meanwhile, she notes that potential budget cuts could further erode staffing and resources.

“We are at risk,” she says. “It’s definitely public knowledge that we are underfunded and that things are not looking like they would get better without intervention; they’re going to get worse, and we’re not going to be able to provide these types of services.”

In November 2023, the Government Accountability Office issued a report noting that EBSA’s budget has largely remained flat over the last 10 years, even as the agency’s responsibilities have grown. Gomez says she will continue working to get the funding the department needs, while also “coming up with a Plan B,” as needed, to be prepared. The department’s funding is part of a number of ongoing budget battles that are yet to be determined.

EBSA currently oversees about 2.8 million health plans, 619,000 other welfare benefit plans and 765,000 private pension plans that cover 153 million workers representing an estimated $12.8 trillion in assets.