Every year, pension plan sponsors are required to file a return with the U.S. Department of Labor. These returns, known as the Form 5500 series, contain detailed information about the plans' finances, participants, and administrators that allows government agencies to monitor compliance with the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and the Internal Revenue Code. The comprehensive nature of the Form 5500 series makes them a primary source for examining the state of the private pension world: from participation rates to financial health to 401(k) investment in company stock to the size of employer contributions — it is all there. Unfortunately, these rich data are not available in a timely manner. The data from the "Private Pension Plan Bulletins Abstract of Form 5500 Annual Reports" — the official tabulations put out by the Department of Labor commonly used by practitioners and researchers — have a five-year lag. Sponsors have up to ten months to file the forms, and it can take up to two years to convert the raw forms, which generally are filed in paper, into a manageable and complete dataset. Then, these data must be cleaned, analyzed, and tabulated. The resulting lag meant that as of early 2006, official tabulations were available only up to 2000. This brief uses raw 5500 Form data from the Department of Labor to extend the tabulations to 2003 — the latest year in which the datasets are available. The estimations are done for the 1990-2003 period, and are presented as a data appendix to this brief. The 1990-2000 numbers match closely those from official reports; the 2001-2003 calculations bring the tabulations as up-to-date as currently possible. Using these recent data, this brief highlights trends that are impossible to observe in the current official releases: a notable increase in pension contributions for defined benefit plans; the decline and recovery of pension assets in the 2001-2003 period; the continued use of cash balance plans; and the sustained move in coverage towards defined contribution plans.
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Paper provided by Center for Retirement Research in its series Issues in Brief with number
ib42.
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