Julio Portalatin, president and CEO of Mercer, is urging Congressional leaders to reconsider the increases in premiums to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. authorized with the passage of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015.

In a letter to the majority and minority leaders of both chambers of Congress, Portalatin called the increases “unnecessary” and “counterproductive” to PBGC’s goal of protecting and enhancing the country’s retirement security.

Pressed up against the threat of defaulting on its obligations, the budget deal passed the House and then the Senate in a matter of days.

It extends the country’s debt ceiling and increases spending by about $80 billion over the next two years.

The budget bill pays for the increased spending in part with revenue raised by the premium hikes.

In 2015, the per-participant amount for the flat-rate premium is $57 in 2015. Next year it is set to go to $64, an increase authorized by the 2013 transportation bill.

The budget bill authorized more increases, scheduling the per-participant rate to go to $68 for 2017, $73 for 2018, and $78 for 2019.

Those were authorized in spite of the improving funding status of PBGC’s single-employer program. Its 2014 funding deficit of $19.3 billion is expected to shrink to $4.9 billion by 2024—a $3 billion improvement from estimates made just last year.

That improvement is largely explained by recent premium increases.

In 2014, sponsors paid $3.8 billion in premiums, up from $2.9 billion in 2013 and a record in payments to the agency.

In his letter, Portalatin asks both the Republican and Democratic leaders of each chamber to “help” the rest of the bodies to “resist future increases by ending the budget scoring practice that lets them look like revenue gains for the government even though they cannot, by law, be used for anything other than the PBGC insurance program.”

He quotes PBGC’s own thoughts on the program’s health, conveyed in its 2013 projections report, which said it “is highly unlikely that the single-employer program will run out of funds in the next 10 years.”

Alan Glickstein, senior retirement consultant at Towers Watson, conveyed an opinion shared by pension experts across the industry when the White House released the new rate hikes in its proposed budget.

“There is no good reason for Congress to go back to the same place to raise revenue and encourage more plan sponsors to de-risk their pension plans, which is exactly what these new increases will do,” Glickstein told BenefitsPro.

Score keepers can now add Mercer and Portalatin to the growing chorus of experts, which includes former PBGC director Josh Gotbaum, who think the new hike will only accelerate a growing instinct in corporate American to de-risk pension obligations.

“We believe unreasonably high PBGC premiums are actually accelerating the decline of the very plans that PBGC should be supporting and are thereby reducing the amount of premiums that will actually be collected by the agency,” wrote Portalatin.

In 2014 the per-participant flat rate premium was $49, and in 2011 it was $35, meaning the new rate increases will ultimately represent a more-than 100 percent increase in less than 10 years.

“We at Mercer know first hand that the $16 billion (over 10 years) in increased PBGC premiums enacted in 2012 and 2013 are already pulling important resources from other key business priorities and undermining employers’ desires to maintain pension plans,” added Portalatin.

He called the successive increases a “material” risk for the private pension system.

Instant Insights /

Mercer CEO urges Congress to reconsider PBGC premium hikes

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