As a plan sponsor, you need to ensure that participant beneficiary forms are up to date. It’s not enough to ensure that every participant has filled one out; you also have to ensure that they’re updated. Family lives and situations change, so it should make sense that what a participant may have selected as a beneficiary might change because of marriage, divorce, or death.
For any plan education and enrollment meetings, I would stress for the participants to update their beneficiary information because as an ERISA attorney, one of the most stressful jobs is trying to determine who a beneficiary is if an enrollment form is missing or some issues might threaten the validity of an executed form (such as a new marriage).
