M & K Employee Solutions, LLC v. Trustees of the Iam National Pension Fund

Questions presented

SCOTUS records, cert granted 30 Jun 2025

The Employee Retirement Income Security Act imposes "withdrawal liability" when an employer withdraws from an underfunded multiemployer pension plan. This withdrawal liabilty covers the employer's share of the plan's underfunding. Because a plan's amount of underfunding hinges on projections about its projected liabilities and assets decades into the future, withdrawal liability computations are partly a product of actuarial assumptions about anticipated interest rates and other predictions. Withdrawal liability must be computed "as of the end of the plan year preceding the plan year in which the employer withdraws." E.g., 29 U.S.C. 1391(b)(2)(E)(i). The question presented is: Whether 29 U.S.C. 1391's instruction to compute withdrawal liability "as of the end of the plan year" requires the plan to base the computation on the actuarial assumptions to which its actuary subscribed at the end of the year, or allows the plan to use different actuarial assumptions that were adopted after the end of the year.

Opinion summary

Etalia.ai summary of the majority opinion

The dispute was whether ERISA requires the actuarial assumptions used to calculate withdrawal liability for a multiemployer pension plan to be chosen on or before the statutory measurement date. The Court, in an opinion by Justice Jackson, held that it does not. The Court said section 1391 fixes the date for the plan’s hard factual inputs, but does not set a deadline for selecting actuarial assumptions. It also said section 1393 requires assumptions to be reasonable and to reflect the actuary’s best estimate, and that reading a pre-measurement-date deadline into that section would add a limit Congress did not include. The Court rejected arguments based on another ERISA provision addressing plan rules and amendments, as well as policy concerns about manipulation, and affirmed the judgment below.