Most fiduciaries don’t think of their summary plan description as a liability risk. It’s a compliance document—something the recordkeeper drafts, maybe HR reviews, and participants file away without reading. But a recent court decision shows just how expensive an incomplete SPD can be.
Carol Buckmann of Cohen & Buckmann walks through the case in a recent post. In Pederson v. Kinder Morgan Inc. (S.D. Tex., August 10, 2026), the employer changed how service was calculated for participants hired before age 35 in a way that reduced their future benefits. The change was prospective and legally permissible—accrued benefits weren’t touched. But Summary Plan Description (SPD) never clearly explained the new formula. When a participant eventually requested a benefit calculation and discovered the discrepancy, he sued.
The court didn’t find fraud. It didn’t need to. Quoting from the Second Circuit’s Amara v. Cigna decision, it concluded that omitting a material change from an SPD—even without bad intent—can justify reforming the plan to provide benefits as if the change had never happened. That’s an expensive remedy for a disclosure problem no one noticed until years later.
Ms. Buckmann says this kind of gap is more common than sponsors realize. Many plans use pre-approved documents from their recordkeeper, and the notices that come with them tend to be generic. You’ve probably seen the language: “Your plan may include bonuses in compensation. Ask your plan administrator for more information.” That kind of vagueness might not satisfy ERISA’s requirement that SPDs disclose all material provisions in language an average participant can understand—and it puts the fiduciary on the hook if something goes wrong.
The problem compounds after acquisitions and plan mergers, when grandfathered benefits, special vesting schedules, or minimum benefit formulas may not make it into the new SPD. Consolidation in the recordkeeping industry makes this worse. The people administering your plan today may not be the ones who helped set it up, which increases the odds that something gets misdescribed or left out entirely.
AI-drafted communications are adding to the risk. Ms. Buckmann notes that fiduciaries sometimes don’t realize they’re responsible for the content of documents generated by AI tools—mistakes and all.
Her advice: have legal counsel review all plan communications for accuracy and completeness, not just after a transaction but as a matter of course. If your recordkeeper uses template language and won’t customize it, consider preparing a custom SPD. Recordkeepers often allow this with a caveat that they’re not responsible for any changes you make—but that’s a tradeoff worth considering when the alternative is a court rewriting your plan.
The lesson from Kinder Morgan is that when it comes to plan communications, less is not more.
