The Fifth Circuit concluded that a plan’s three-year contractual limitations period began to accrue when a beneficiary received a letter in 2008 that prominently displayed on the first page the monthly earnings used to calculate his long term disability benefits.  The Court held that the claim was time-barred because the beneficiary failed to bring his miscalculation claim until 2017.  In so holding, the Court explained that the alleged discrepancy in monthly earnings of almost $3,000 was so large and fundamental that its effect on the beneficiary’s plan benefits was apparent, and the discrepancy was not of a type that required him “to decipher complex formulae or piece together inferences from incomplete information.”  The case is Faciane v. Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada, No. 18-30918, 2019 WL 3334654 (5th Cir. July 25, 2019).

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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.