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Best Practices in Defined-Benefit Plan Management

Companies must balance a host of disparate, and sometimes competing, pressures in managing their pension plans.

By Bob Collie, Hal Bradford, David Phillips & Gary Stentz | Updated on July 29, 2013

According to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), there are more than 25,000 corporate pension plans in the United States.1

For each of these plans, managers in the sponsoring company make decisions on a regular basis about how much and how frequently to contribute to the plan and what investment strategy to pursue with plan assets. Until recently, the most common approach to these decisions taken by plan sponsors could be loosely characterized as: Let’s make contributions at the minimum level permitted by regulation, and let’s use a growth-oriented investment approach, trusting that over time the combination of market returns and legislative smoothing will lead the plan to be fully funded at a reasonable—and reasonably stable—cost.

That approach doesn’t necessarily work anymore. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 (PPA) redefined how contributions are calculated, moving in the direction of marked-to-market valuations and also reducing the time period over which funding shortfalls need to be made good. Statement of Financial Accounting Standards SFAS 158 had a similar impact on how pension plans are captured on corporate balance sheets. These changes increased the complexity of managing pension plans’ impact on the sponsor’s financials.

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