Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Pension Committee, et al. v. Thomas N. Reichert, et al.

ERISA provides that pension plans must offer certain joint and survivor annuities that are the “actuarial equivalent” of single life annuities. 29 U.S.C. § 1055(d). In the decision below, a divided panel of the Sixth Circuit held that this language implicitly permits courts to require plan administrators to use “reasonable” actuarial assumptions, even when the assumptions used to calculate equivalence are specified in the plan document. The question presented is: Whether § 1055(d)’s requirement that certain annuities be “actuarial[ly] equivalen[t]” permits courts to impose an unwritten “reasonableness” requirement on a plan’s actuarial assumptions, or instead requires only mathematical equivalence under the assumptions specified in the plan document.