Participants will always be fully vested in their own contributions but the employer's contributions will be subject to specific vesting schedules. When completing the review of a distribution, ensure to compare their credited YOS, the plan's vesting schedule, and the participant's actual vested percentages in employer contributions for accuracy.  

If vesting does not appear to be correct, mark the Vesting Ok box as no and add a note saying research is being done on vesting. Please ensure to keep track of any requests still pending vesting issues to ensure nothing is stalled in error.

In the above example, this plan has a 2/20 schedule for vesting. See below for full breakdown of YOS required to be fully vested (found in plan specs). This participant is only credited with 1 YOS but their plan requires 6 YOS to be fully vested. Due to this, we know additional research is required to determine if this vesting is valid or if corrections are needed.

Below are various scenarios where a participant may be either 100% vested or vested in a higher percentage despite the current vesting schedule that is set and we should look into any of the below options before taking next steps.

1) if a participant's plan has terminated, all participants will be 100% vested immediately regardless of their YOS.

2) if a participant has met the plan's Normal Retirement Age (typically age 65) as outlined in their plan document, they should be fully vested in most cases. Check plan docs, ex: R:\CAPITALClients\ClaimAid Consulting Corporation\PlanDocument to review Adoption Agreement. Some plans may vest at Early Retirement Age, which would also be outlined in the adoption agreement.

3) there is a prior vesting schedule that the participant may be grandfathered into. Check prior plan docs for older adoption agreements that may fall in line with their date of hire, ex: R:\CAPITALClients\ClaimAid Consulting Corporation\PlanDocument\Prior Docs

4) at times, the cover sheet may have inaccurate YOS listed. Check the participant's census to determine their hours worked each year with the plan. If they've worked at least 1,000 hours in a year, that is considered 1 YOS.

5) there also may have been issues when the plan came over to Ameritas that lead to incorrect YOS being loaded into Relius. We can also check their plan set up folder to see if there are any census files that have info supporting their vesting percentage, ex: R:\CAPITALClients\ClaimAid Consulting Corporation\PlanSetUp

In this specific example above for our participant that is 80% vested, there is a file in the Plan Set Up > YOS Verification folder that shows she is credited with 5 YOS per their records, which aligns with the 80% vesting we see on her account.

Now that we know her vesting is correct, we can mark the Vesting Ok box to Yes and add a note with our findings.

If you are unable to find any support for a participant's vesting using any of the above methods, you will need to contact the Ameritas plan admin assigned to this plan to explain your findings and ask if they have any additional information to support the participant's vesting or if a correction is needed. See attached email for example.