By: Russ Kamp, Managing Director, Ryan ALM, Inc.

We hope that you enjoyed a terrific Labor Day Weekend with family and friends. I can’t believe that we are 2/3rds of the way through 2024. Can you?

With regard to the PBGC’s effort implementing the ARPA legislation, there wasn’t a ton of apparent activity last week. We did have Teamsters Local 11 Pension Plan, a North Haledon, NJ (about 10 minutes from my home) non-priority plan file its revised application seeking $27.3 million in Special Financial Assistance (SFA) to help support the benefit promises to 2,012 plan participants.

There were no SFA awards last week. Furthermore, there were no applications denied or withdrawn. However, we continue to see some previous SFA recipients repay excess grant awards. In the last week, Laborers’ Pension Plan Local Union No. 186 and IBEW Local No. 237 Pension Plan repaid a total of $76,898.71 on grants of $79.8 million or 9.6 bps. Since the issue of overpayments due to incorrect census data was first recognized, nine pension plans have repaid a total of $138 million (mostly Central States) or 0.36% of the grants awarded.

There is still much to be done by the PBGC in completing the ARPA implementation. There are 113 potential applications that have yet to be approved, and in many cases, even reviewed (69). At this time, 44% of the expected applications have received SFA totaling $67.7 billion in SFA grants. That is an incredible total of benefits that have been secured. Let’s hope that the investment programs implemented are also securing those assets that have been received and benefits that have been promised.