Mapping in a 401(k) plan occurs when an investment option is removed and the participant’s investment in that option is transferred to a different investment option (absent direction from the participant).  On remand from the Eighth Circuit, the district court in Tussey v. ABB Inc., No. 2:06-cv-04305 (W.D. Mo. July 9, 2015), held that plan fiduciaries abused their discretion when they mapped participants’ investments from a balanced fund to the plan trustee’s managed allocation fund.  In so ruling, the court found that the trustee and plan sponsor had entered into an improper cross-subsidization agreement whereby the trustee was paid above-market rates for providing services to the plan in exchange for providing various administrative services to the plan sponsor at a loss.  As a result of this conflict, the court held that the plan’s decision to map funds was “motivated in large part” to benefit the trustee and the plan sponsor, rather than the plan participants.  Despite this finding, the court declined to award plaintiffs damages.  The court held that because the plan’s investment policy statement contemplated the addition of a managed allocation fund to the plan’s investment options, the proper measure of damages was the “difference between the performance of the [balanced fund] and the minimum return of the subset of managed allocation funds the ABB fiduciaries could have chosen without breaching their fiduciary obligations.”  Although the court on remand allowed discovery on this damages calculation, neither party presented evidence regarding the performance of any alternative managed allocation fund.  As a result, the court held that the plaintiffs had failed to satisfy their burden of proof on the issue of damages.

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Photo of Neil V. Shah Neil V. Shah

Neil V. Shah is a member of the Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Group, where he focuses on ERISA litigation.

He is the lead attorney representing the firm’s Taft-Hartley plan clients in withdrawal liability and delinquent contributions matters.  As part of his practice…

Neil V. Shah is a member of the Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Group, where he focuses on ERISA litigation.

He is the lead attorney representing the firm’s Taft-Hartley plan clients in withdrawal liability and delinquent contributions matters.  As part of his practice, Neil pursues employers, their owners and officers, and affiliated companies to collect the amounts owed to these plans using a variety of complex legal theories, and has secured several precedential opinions and multi-million-dollar judgments in their favor.  Neil also defends these plans in arbitrations challenging the methods and assumptions used to calculate withdrawal liability, which has yielded a number of notable arbitration decisions and court opinions.  Owing to his experience in this area, Neil is a co-editor of the withdrawal liability chapter of the premier employee benefits treatise, Employee Benefits Law, published by Bloomberg, and regularly presents on the topic before practitioners and consultants that work in the area, such as at meetings of the Conference of Consulting Actuaries and the Employee Benefits Section of ABA’s Section of Labor & Employment Law.

In addition to his Taft-Hartley plan experience, Neil has represented several plan sponsors and fiduciaries in ERISA class actions alleging that the plan’s investments or other practices are imprudent, such as excessive fee and stock drop cases.

Prior to joining Proskauer, Neil was an associate at a large regional firm, where he litigated individual and class actions involving challenges to insurer claims adjudication procedures under ERISA, fraud recoveries against healthcare providers, and claims for benefits.

Neil has authored several articles, including those published in the New Jersey Law Journal and Bloomberg National Affairs.  He is also a frequent contributor to Proskauer’s Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Blog.