Employee Benefits

What are Employee Benefit Claims?

Employee benefit claims can take many forms and can be raised by current or former participants, or their beneficiaries.

Some estimate employment benefits make up to 40% of an employee’s total compensation. This compensation comes in the form of retirement plans, health insurance, disability insurance, life insurance, and tuition reimbursement. Although employers are not required to provide these benefits, once they do, they cannot go back on promised benefits or discriminate for unlawful reasons when it comes to benefits.

In the United States, employees, former employees, and beneficiaries, are protected from denial of employer-provided disability, medical, retirement and other benefit claims by ERISA under federal law in the private sector, and under state law for public or other types of ERISA-exempted benefit plans.  These claims arise during employment, while disabled, in the termination of employment, when retired, and for the estates of the deceased.

Employees may bring ERISA and employee benefit claims based on: providing written or oral communications about employee benefits during any time of employment; in denying disability, medical, retirement or other benefit claims; and during termination, divorce, retirement, or disciplinary action.

Using the ERISA federal employee benefits law, and parallel state statutes, our attorneys can help ensure that you are being treated fairly in the workplace when it comes to these employee benefits. Contact us to discuss your situation.

Employee Benefits Understood

ERISA and employee benefits claims are sometimes straightforward and sometimes not so easy to spot.  On the easier side, if you are wrongfully denied covered disability, medical, retirement, or other benefits, you may be able to recover the cost of those denied claims. Additionally, without access to your employee benefit plan, its summary plan description (SPD), or other plan documents, you might not understand that not only have you been denied rightful benefits, but also the administrators and managers of your plan may be breaching the fiduciary duties of acting in your best interest and acting as a reasonable fiduciary should do under similar circumstances. Fiduciary status means that plan administrators and others are held to the highest standards of care known to law. Only a review of your plan documents by a trained and experienced employee benefit attorney can discover whether you have such claims.  In such claims, the burden is on the employee or other covered person to prove that a benefit-related decision wrongfully denied them an employee benefit or that there was a breach of a fiduciary duty of loyalty or care owed to them.

These cases are very complex and require legal advice from only those who concentrate on ERISA or employee benefits law. If you believe a violation of your employee benefit rights may have occurred, contact Walcheske & Luzi, LLC today.