Understanding Plan Administration

Most day-to-day activities involve working with employees and other plan participants as they accrue and then receive pension benefits. However, there are also some general administrative tasks relating to the plan itself, rather than to plan participants. These include:

• Setting up basic identifying information, such as the plan's administrator, the plan's employer identification number (EIN), and the plan address.

• Establishing funding providers for the plan.

  When you set up retiree payments, you identify the funding source using the values you establish. The system includes funding provider information in the instructions you send to the third-party trustee who provides the pension checks.

• Identifying the company (or companies) used to house the plan's payees in the PeopleSoft system.

  Payee records in the PeopleSoft HCM system use the same data structure as employee records. This means that you identify companies, jobs, locations, and other employment-related information in the payee record. Much of this data is generic to all payees; for example, you can establish a single job to use for all retirees.

• Setting up activity lists, which are checklists for the administrative processes that require you to perform standard sets of tasks—for example, terminations, retirements, and deaths.