Fixing Service Date Errors for a Complex Union Workforce

A large manufacturing company provided annual non-elective retirement contributions with percentages varying by union and non-union employees’ years of service. While the formulas themselves were straightforward, applying the eligibility rules, compensation definitions, and service calculations across more than twenty union groups with different histories and a participant population with frequent employment status changes had become increasingly difficult over time.

Like many large employers that have undergone acquisitions and multiple recordkeeper transitions, the organization no longer had a reliable system for tracking service dates consistently across its workforce. Each transition introduced inconsistencies into the data, including service dates entered incorrectly, estimated, or carried forward without verification.

The complexity grew further when employees left the company and were later rehired. In many cases, prior years of service were not properly accounted for, creating situations where employees appeared to have either more or fewer years of service than they had actually earned. For an employee with 25 years of service incorrectly recorded as 10 years, the resulting annual contribution errors could easily aggregate to more than $15,000.

By the time SBA was engaged, the annual reconciliation process had become overwhelming. The benefits team was spending weeks manually resolving conflicting records across multiple legacy systems while participants increasingly questioned whether their balances were accurate. The organization had long suspected there was a substantial problem with the service data, but the scale and complexity of the issue had grown too large to manage internally.

SBA approached the engagement in three phases. The first was establishing a single, reliable source of service data. Working across approximately ten legacy data sources, including payroll records, prior recordkeeper files, HR system exports, and acquisition documentation, the team researched each participant’s employment history, applied the organization’s service crediting and break-in-service rules, and built one consolidated file with verified service dates for every affected employee.

Once the service data was validated, SBA analyzed ten years of contribution history and identified participants who had received incorrect retirement contribution amounts. SBA calculated correction amounts for each affected individual and each impacted year, including former employees who required corrective payments.

The review also identified overpayments. SBA helped leadership evaluate whether recovering those amounts was operationally appropriate.

The third phase focused on preventing the problem from recurring. SBA worked with the internal team to establish standardized data inputs, validation checkpoints, and clear rules for handling rehires, acquisitions, and new union group additions going forward. The January contribution cycle that had previously required weeks of manual reconciliation became a structured, repeatable, and auditable process. 

The correction effort reached back more than a decade and restored a quarter of a million dollars in corrected retirement contributions to affected participants. Some former employees received payments years after leaving the organization for contribution amounts they had not known were missing.

For the company, the project resolved a long-standing compliance and operational risk while giving the benefits team something it had not had in years: confidence in the accuracy of its own data.

The repeatable process SBA implemented significantly reduced the annual administrative burden and gave the organization a defensible framework for managing service-date calculations across a large and historically complex workforce.