2020 Group Benefits Program SPDs and SMMs Now Available
Benefits administrators will receive a Message Center notification linking to the Group Plan Documents page on the Employee Benefits website, where 2020 Group Benefits Program summary plan description (SPD) and summary of material modifications (SMM) documents will be available for immediate download and distribution on January 8, 2020. SPDs and SMMs for plans with special or exception designs will continue to be released during January. All documents will be available by January 31.
Give the SPDs and SMMs to current participants and beneficiaries no later than March 1, 2020. Also give them to employees you hire during 2020 within 90 days of their hire date. This also applies to directors elected or appointed during 2020. COBRA plan participants, retirees, surviving dependents and any children under a qualified medical child support order must also receive their own copy if they do not reside with your employee.
2020 SPDs were issued for:
- Existing plans that your co-op changed, and
- New plans built in the Benefit Plan Rating and Renewal (BPR) feature on the Employee Benefits website during annual renewal.
You will receive a 2020 SMM for any plans that you confirmed online without changes during annual renewal. To accompany the documents, a list of 2020 group benefit plan changes is available online.
Before distributing your documents, review them to confirm that the elections your co-op made during annual renewal (e.g., deductible amounts and coinsurance) are correct. Contact the group compliance team if you find a discrepancy.
A checklist to help with review, distribution, and acknowledgement tasks is available on the Employee Benefits website. There, you’ll also find guidelines to help you decide if you can distribute documents electronically to certain participants.
SPDs and SMMs requiring acknowledgement are listed in the “Documents Requiring Acknowledgement” section of the Group Plan Documents page. Be sure to acknowledge all outstanding distributions shown on the page, including those from prior years. If you have questions about downloading or accessing your SPDs and SMMs, contact the Member Contact Center at 866.673.2299 or contactcenter@nreca.coop. For all other SPD or SMM questions, call the benefits compliance team at 866.673.2299, option 7, or email us at group.compliance@nreca.coop.