If CFOs Are Worried About Benefit Costs, Why Are They Leaving Avoidable Pension Costs on the Table?

This morning's lead article in the Wall Street Journal's CFO Journal says that CFOs are concerned about benefit costs. This was not at all surprising to me. What is surprising though is how much they are leaving on the table relative to defined benefit pension plans, often frozen legacy plans.

Let's start out with some background. 40 years ago, most large companies in the US provided defined benefit (DB) pensions for large parts of their workforce. This was, of course, before the 401(k) gave us the perhaps misguided self-sufficiency explosion. Over time, many of those employers froze those DB plans (meaning no new participants and those in the plan get no further accruals) and some terminated them. But, there remain a lot of frozen DB plans that remain in what some call hibernation. I call it lingering death.

That lingering death seems to go on interminably. And, there are reasons that happens. Freeze the plan and it becomes out of sight, out of mind. Not to overdo the cliches, but they go into a set it and forget it mode.

But, set it and forget it with a legacy pension may not work so well. Research by October Three has shown that many of these plans have what might be termed overhead or frictional costs exceeding 1% of plan assets. That means that for a not atypical frozen plan that the long-term cost of that plan -- unless the sponsor is willing to fund it sufficiently to terminate it may be 10-15% higher than if those frictional costs were entirely eliminated. (Understand that it is impossible to eliminate all of those frictional costs, but most can often be eliminated.)

How does this happen? Nobody is paying attention. There's nobody on staff focused on efficiency in that frozen plan. The last person doing that went away a few months after the plan was frozen. So, now, a typical company with a, for example, $50 million frozen plan may be spending more than half a million dollars per year on that plan unnecessarily. 

Suppose the company assigned one professional to that plan. Suppose they made that plan half of that person's responsibility, at least until the plan is terminated. And, suppose they pay that person $200,000 per year. Let's add in another 25% for additional employment costs and we're up to $250,000. Then, this company is eliminating more costs than it is incurring and in doing so, they are getting rid of perhaps an unnecessary headache.

The last obstacle is figuring out what this person should focus on. And, since they probably have not been focused on pensions, they may not know. However, there is a good chance that they are paying a lot of money for consulting that is not focused on their needs. Or, the consulting might be excellent, but the company's lack of focus causes them to ignore it.

Either way, this is something to consider and if they're not sure, I know someone who can guide them down the right path.

Check Your Lenses to See Properly

Which lenses are you wearing right now? Come on, take a look. Are they the right ones?

No, this is not one of those cheesy Ray-Ban coupons that litter social media. This is about consulting.

Which lenses are you wearing right now?

I think it's a good question.

If you're like me, you've been wearing glasses or contact lenses for a long time in order to see more clearly. In my case, I wear progressive lenses (readers, mid-range, and distance all in one) for every day and work and I wear distance only lenses for sports. In case you're wondering, it's not easy to hit a tennis ball well when the size of the ball changes as you look through different parts of your lens.

But, back to consulting, did you check to see which lenses you are wearing?

Let's consider a simple example. I'm an actuary. A lot of the people I work with -- my peers -- are also actuaries. My clients generally are not.

If I am writing a memo for internal consumption by other actuaries, i can wear my actuarial lens. There is a high expectation that my readers will understand my position in the ways that I want them to understand it.

But, suppose I need to take that same memo and send it to a client. My client may not know the difference between a carryover balance and a prefunding balance. My client may not understand that PBO and ABO do not move necessarily in lockstep. My client may not even know what any of these things are.

So, when I write to my client, I explain things to them at the level that I perceive is right for them. Or, put differently, when going from my internal actuarial memo to my external consulting memo, I've changed lenses. In the first case, my lenses are thick and monocular. In the second case, they are gradual and at least binocular as I translate from that which is hard to see at a distance to something that my client can see easily close up.

My lenses have an emotional side to them as well. And, there's a fancy name for it, well not so fancy. Empathy. I try the best I can to put myself in my client's shoes -- to put myself in their position and to write for their benefit, not for anyone else's.

That's hard. When we write a consulting piece, we all want to seem brilliant to our clients. We take off that client lens and put on our own lens just dazzle from the keyboard with thoughts so profound and complex that we must truly be in a league of our own. But, who knows it? The poor client who reads it gets bored. They put it down. They call a competitor for a translation.

Uh oh, or if you are a fan of Scooby Doo, rutro.

So, let's take off our own lens and put the client lens back on. In doing so, we rewrite our masterpiece on the intricacies of an Internal Revenue Code section whose mere label fills up an entire line and simplify it. We make it so that our client can understand it. Yes, I know, we think we have dumbed it down. But, really, that client lens is the empathy lens. Done properly, our client doesn't find it dumbed down, but just right.

Now, our client thinks we are brilliant.

Cookie Cutter Doesn't Cut It

I was on the phone with a sophisticated client a few days ago. She remarked that the solution she was looking at was just pulled off the shelf and could equally apply to any [company]. She said that was bad consulting. I have to agree. Thankfully, that consulting was not ours.

When I started in the business, back in prehistoric times, the modus operandi that many of us were introduced to included answer the phone, do the work, record your time, and someone will bill the client for it. Complaints appeared to be limited.

Things got more complex. The booming economy in our business created by the Reagan-era bull markets and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was a veritable full employment act for consulting actuaries. Employers of those actuaries needed all the quality staff they could find and clients needed all the support they could get.

Things changed. As processes got automated and later, as companies began to exit the business of sponsoring pension plans, this once highly valued actuarial service became more of a commodity. Whether it was true or not, consulting actuaries who could deliver actuarial valuations were viewed as being a dime a dozen.

How did the best differentiate themselves? They began to provide more and more customized solutions. They began to understand the client's business needs. There was a sudden shift in the order of necessary skills. The key ability of being able to do things was replaced in the pecking order by the ability to listen and then to thoughtfully react.

Somewhere around the same time, our society seemed to become far more litigious. The answer to many problems became finding some other party who could be found to be at fault and exacting a price from that party. Some made the observation that in response to this, there were a number of consulting firms that developed solutions that everyone should bring to each of their clients. In fact, I can recall professional friends of mine complaining that they needed to be able to "check the box' for each of their clients even if they felt as if that meant they were providing less than the optimal answer. In other words, they were being encouraged, or even required to pull the answer off the shelf or some might say, to deliver a cookie cutter solution.

Put yourself in the corporate shoes. Your adviser that you have worked with for years brings you a solution that they label best-in-class. A few days later, you find yourself at a gathering with your peers from other local companies. Alas, they have all been brought the same solution.

How is that possible? The companies aren't the same. Their plans aren't the same.

It's then that you remember that you had agreed, based on a referral, to a meeting the next day with some consultant you had never heard of. You wondered if she would try to sell you on the same best-in-class solution.

She didn't. After the initial niceties, she asked you a bunch of questions. And after each question, she listened to your answer and reacted accordingly by asking a follow-up, more probing question. She remarked that she was surprised that you weren't pursuing [pick your favorite strategy to fill in the blank] instead of the not best-in-class one that your longtime adviser had brought you.

You wanted to to business with her, didn't you?

The Easy Benefits Answer May be Compliance

I ran into an interesting situation the other day. I can't disclose enough of the details for reasons of confidentiality to use that as a case study. The point of the exercise, though, was that a client was looking for a loophole to escape the claws of what it was told is a horrible provision of the Internal Revenue Code. After analysis, however, I was able to determine that the loophole, as they put it, just doesn't work for them.

There, was a better and simpler solution, though. Just follow the law (without regard to the loophole).

While I can't use this week's example, it harkens back to the late 80s and early 90s (yes, I was doing similar work even then). Readers in their 50s or older may recall that the first Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86) regulations to come out were the proposed 401(l) regulations that graced the pages of the Federal Register in late 1988. Lawyers, consultants, and actuaries (me among them) raced to digest those regulations and to be the first to tell their clients and prospects how to comply.

I digress for a moment to explain why this could have been so important. 401(l) explained how to integrate certain qualified retirement plans with Social Security in order for those plans to be exempt from the general test for nondiscrimination under Code Section 401(a)(4). Prior to TRA86, permissible integration was determined under Revenue Ruling 71-446, and whether or not a group of plans was discriminatory in nature was determined under the comparability rules of Revenue Ruling 81-202. What was different, though, was that if you had an integrated plan and you couldn't prove that it was properly integrated per RR 71-446, you risked your qualified status. Under TRA86, proper integration was more of a convenience.

Returning to the main plot, we all rushed out to our clients and many with defined benefit (DB) plans redesigned them to be properly integrated making them safe harbor. Those clients then needed to deal with transition rules under Notice 88-131. Some with good memories will remember racking our brains over choices between Options II and III and Alternative II-D.

Other sponsors made a different decision. They chose to not redesign their plans. That meant that they had to comply with the general test for nondiscrimination.

Well, for most, that turned out not to be such a big deal. It meant that every year or two years or three years, they had to engage their actuary to perform a test that was usually pretty easy to pass. What they got in return was a lack of disruption. For them, the easiest answer was not to find a way out of testing, but simply to pass a test that they could easily pass.

Returning finally to my initial point from this post, the client in question was trying to get out of a rule that counsel had told them was pretty horrible. And, it's true, it can be a horrible rule. But, in this specific case, the compliance burden associated with this rule will be minimal.

And, that means that what is perhaps the optimal solution will be simple.

Sometimes, the right answer has nothing to do with loopholes. Sometimes, the easiest (and best) answer is compliance.