| Pension plan administrators make little
effort to locate lost employees or missing
beneficiaries who have moved or changed name over the
years, and companies owing unclaimed pension benefits
may have moved, change name or merged, making them
difficult to find. To further complicate matters,
unclaimed pension benefits will not always show up in
unclaimed property databases, and in many cases
pension obligations have been transferred to a
successor company after a merger or reorganization.
(If you are certain a company merged with or was
acquired by another but don't know which one, go to:
Stock Search )
Because
many private pension plans are federally insured,
even if a company dissolved or went bankrupt it may
be possible to receive unclaimed benefits. (Also note
thousands of employees of companies whose pension
plans were terminated between 1976 and 1981 may be
eligible to receive payments averaging $10-12,000 as
a result of a settlement reached in recent a class
action lawsuit.)
For
assistance tracing a lost pension and to search the
Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation's missing
participant database order our Special Report: Lost Pension
Search
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