Setting Up a Spouse Eligibility Statement

Certain plans, particularly public sector plans, offer spouses an automatic joint and survivor benefit continuation. That is, the spouse gets the benefit continuation without there being any actuarial reduction to the employee's benefit. If you sponsor a plan with this feature, you incorporate the automatic benefit into the normal form of payment parameters in your benefit formula. You must also create a spouse eligibility custom statement.

Some plans that offer automatic benefit continuation have spouse eligibility requirements for the automatic benefit, such as a minimum time span between marriage and benefit commencement. This requirement is entered in a spouse eligibility custom Statement using a Boolean IF clause. When plans that offer automatic benefit continuation do not have such a requirement, a dummy spouse eligibility custom statement must be created.

For example, to set up a requirement that the employee be married for a year, you would first create a duration to measure the time between the marital status date and the event date (both are delivered aliases). The custom statement would then have a single clause evaluating whether this duration is greater than one. To set up a dummy statement that is always true, you can use a simple statement such as this: if 'yes' equals 'yes'

To apply the spouse eligibility statement to a plan, enter the name of the statement in the Surviving Spouse Eligibility field on the Plan Aliases page.