| October 2, 2006 |
| The annual statement (2005 Annual Covered Earnings Report) from the American Federation of Musicians and Employers’ Pension Fund (AFM-EPF) was recently mailed and most of you have probably already received it - or will shortly. Unfortunately, it appears that significant amounts of employment and employer contributions do not appear on some statements, primarily for engagements during the last half of 2005. |
| RMA encourages all members to carefully examine and reconcile their employment records with their pension statements. However, in this case, if you believe that pensionable employment has not been credited to you, rather than immediately contacting the Pension Fund (and burdening them with many duplicate inquiries about the same job) we believe that the current situation is best served by waiting until the Fund finishes examining the matter. |
| Thanks in major part to participants who carefully review their statements, the Pension Fund is now fully aware of this particular “class” of omissions and is examining the problem, along with appropriate remedy. |
| Maureen Kilkelly, Executive Director of the AFM-EP Fund, has issued the following notice (dated Oct 2,2005) to AFM Officers and related parties, which says in relevant part; |
| “The American Federation of Musicians and Employers’ Pension Fund (“Fund”) mailed the 2005 Annual Statements of Covered Earnings to approximately 60,000 participants of the Fund two weeks ago. Due to a data processing glitch, some musicians received statements that did not contain complete information about their covered engagements. |
| We have investigated the situation and determined that all engagement data that was omitted from the Annual Statements was received and processed in a timely manner by the Fund Office. This data is correct in the Fund’s database and is and has been available for calculation of pension benefits. The engagement data that was omitted from the Annual Statements pertain to payrolls paid by Entertainment Partners, Talent Partners and the Music Performance Fund for covered engagements remitted to the Fund in and after the last calendar quarter of 2005. |
| We are planning to issue revised 2005 Annual Statements to all the musicians that were affected within 4 to 6 weeks. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you and your members and thank you in advance for your patience.” |
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| Once this group of “omissions” is addressed in a global manner for all impacted participants, it should eliminate most (if not all) of the inconsistencies you may see between your current 2005 statement and your 2005 employment records. At a time in the near future after revised statements for 2005 have been sent, if you believe that your 2005 Pension statement still has prospective omissions, moving forward to resolve those will be much easier after this larger problem has been rectified. |
| The great news is that records for the employment in question - and the accompanying employer pension contributions - appear to have been received at the Fund, though for some reason that data was not “allocated” to individual participants when statements were prepared. |
| At this early stage, it also appears (from various 2005 Pension statements examined by RMA), that with regards to SRLA employment (record dates) ─ even when SRLA employment information is missing from current 2005 Pension statements for reasons as described above ─ that nonetheless, the information covering 2005 SRLA employment seems to have been transmitted to the Sound Recording Special Payments Fund (SR-SPF). We hope this preliminary observation proves to be the rule. |
| Meanwhile, RMA suggests that members wait while this revision process unfolds at the Pension Fund.
We will keep you updated as soon as there is additional information. |
| Best Regards, |
| Phillip Ayling |
| President RMA International |
