Plans have both fiduciary requirements and practical motivations to make timely delivery of vested benefits.
It’s surprisingly easy for defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) plans to lose track of participants who no longer are employed by the company. At the individual level, people move to new homes and change their email address and neglect to notify the plan. Participants die and their estate administrators or heirs lack information about a vested benefit.
At the organizational level, merger and acquisition (M&A) activity leads to plans being combined. Plans get renamed and a participant’s original plan could undergo multiple consolidations and name changes. A change of recordkeeper can result in the new one receiving only summary information that lacks a robust history of address tracking efforts by the prior plan.