OPEB mode

The Eligibility criteria specify the requirements for first eligibility, i.e., when an active member first becomes eligible for a benefit, although the benefit may not be fully earned or may not be the most generous benefit possible under the plan. This definition of eligibility is analogous to eligibility as defined for Benefit Definitions in the pension modes.

Full eligibility is specified elsewhere, in the Full Eligibility dialog box. See Full Eligibility - OPEB mode for details.

The requirements for first eligibility specify what criteria an employee needs to have met at the time of decrement in order to receive a benefit, whether or not the benefit is fully earned or most generous. Note that this does not describe the requirements for commencement of, or payment of, the benefit. Those requirements are indicated by use of the deferral parameter in the payment form definition associated with the Benefit Definition.

Conditions (no less than) and Exceptions (no more than) determine when an employee becomes eligible and ineligible, respectively, for the benefit. The grids allow you to specify Age, Service and Points (age + service) criteria as numeric values or Plan Constants for eligibility; each row is interpreted as having “and” linking the requirements. For example, someone must both be 55 years old and have 10 years of service to be eligible if the row has 55 and 10 in it. An individual is considered eligible at the earliest satisfaction of two rows from the grid. For example, to be eligible, someone need be 65 years old or be 62 years old with 10 years of service if there are two rows, one row that specifies age 62 and 10 years of service and another row that specifies age 65.

Exceptions are most often coded in the situation where there are multiple benefits for a single contingency. For example, suppose that two retiree life insurance benefits are included in a plan with retirement eligibility at age 55: a lower face amount for retirement with fewer than 10 years of service, and a higher face amount for retirement with 10 or more years of service. You must exclude people eligible for the second benefit from receiving the first benefit. In other words, the first benefit has conditions of 55 and 0 but exceptions of 55 and 10. The second benefit has conditions of 55 and 10, and no exceptions.

For benefits with an “In-Service” contingency, under Exceptions, a check box is available to indicate that people are Eligible for only one year. When checked, this box indicates that eligibility ends one year after the eligibility conditions are first met. This overrides the entries in the Exceptions table. It is useful for the common case that benefits are payable only in the year when eligibility Conditions are first met.

As soon as an employee meets the eligibility requirements for any retirement benefit in the plan, ProVal will no longer subject the employee to the termination decrement. You need not manually enter this as an exception to the termination benefit. Similarly, ProVal will not subject an employee to the retirement decrement until he or she becomes eligible for a retirement benefit.

Age requirements always refer to the member’s age, although you may be defining eligibility for a benefit payable to the spouse.

Note: If this Benefit Definition contains both a Member Payment form and a Spouse Payment form, it is presumed that coverage has been elected for the spouse whenever coverage has been elected for the member. Therefore, if not all spouses of members with coverage for a benefit also have coverage, separate Benefit Definitions for member and spouse benefits must be defined. For more information, see our Command Reference Help article for the Election Probabilities topic of Valuation Assumptions. Similarly if this Benefit Definition contains both a Member Payment Form and a Spouse Payment Form, and lapse probabilities apply, it is presumed that both the member and spouse benefits apply the same lapse probabilities  (but with the appropriate age/sex table lookup for member or spouse). If that is not the case, separate Benefit Definitions for member and spouse benefits must be defined.

Satisfaction of eligibility requirements is determined with no rounding. For example, an individual 54.9 years old will not be considered to have met an age 55 requirement. If you wish to apply specific rounding requirements for age, you may code the age requirement as 54.5. If you wish to apply specific rounding requirements for service, use a Service Definition.

If there are multiple eligibility requirements based on different definitions of service (for example, age 55 and 10 years of union service or age 60 and 5 years of salaried service), or there are other complexities that render the eligibility requirements grids inadequate to define eligibility completely, one approach to setting the eligibility parameters is to calculate an eligibility date and/or exclusion date for each employee and put the date in a database field. You may then select this field for the or earlier Date parameters of the Conditions and/or Exceptions sections, as appropriate. An individual is considered eligible, or excluded, at the earliest satisfaction of the date field or of a row from the grid. Alternatively, if the grid is insufficient only because of differing definitions of service for its rows, you might not need to calculate an eligibility date or exclusion date; see the discussion below of the Service Overrides button.

The Eligibility service parameter determines how to measure service when applying service-based and points-based eligibility requirements. You may specify either a database Field or a Service Definition. If you specify a Field, you may refer to a date field from which to calculate service or to a numeric field containing service at the valuation date. However, particularly if eligibility service for this Benefit Definition is not counted immediately from hire (e.g., eligibility service for vesting measured from the later of hire date and age 21), you may prefer to specify a date field. Select the desired field from among the numeric and date fields unhidden in the current Project or, if you need fractional service accruals (e.g., hours-related service) or rounding (e.g., count partial years as full years), select from the library of Service Definitions. The button accesses the library to create and modify Service Definitions.

If there are multiple eligibility requirements for which the grid parameters are adequate except for differing definitions of service for the rows (for example, age 55 and 10 years of service from hire or age 60 and 5 years of plan participation), then, to specify an alternative service for a particular grid row, click the Service Overrides button, which leads to the Eligibility Service Overrides dialog box. The Eligibility section of this dialog box lists each row of the Conditions and Exceptions grids, displaying the row Type (condition or exception) and the Age / Service / Points values entered in the grid. To override service for an eligibility Condition or Exception, click one of the entries below, which leads to another dialog box in which you select a Field or Service Definition to use in lieu of the selection, otherwise applied to all rows of the grid, under the Eligibility service parameter of the Benefit Definition dialog box. After selecting the alternative eligibility service, click OK, to return to the Eligibility Service Overrides dialog box, which now displays your selection for the grid rows in the Service Override column. (You may remove an eligibility service override by selecting the grid row it applies to and clicking the Erase button.)

Note that if any eligibility conditions or exceptions have service overrides, the attribution option for unit credit and projected unit credit liabilities cannot be selected as linear proration to benefit eligibility or linear proration to full eligibility.

Click OK to return to the Benefit Definition dialog box, which now displays a check mark on the Service Overrides button, to indicate that the definition of eligibility service has been overridden for at least one row in either the Conditions or Exceptions grid.

Service will be anticipated to increase by one year per calendar year, or, if you have specified a Service Definition, service will be anticipated to increase according to the Service accruals parameter of the Service Definition.

If some active records (e.g., a plant location or division) are ineligible for the Benefit Definition, enter a Selection expression (i.e., a database expression that selects records according to the values in a database field or fields) to specify which records receive this benefit (if other eligibility conditions are met). Alternatively, you may retrieve a Selection Expression previously saved under the Selection Expressions command of the Database menu. Only records that meet the selection criteria of the database expression will receive the benefit. If the Selection expression is blank, all records are considered potentially eligible for this benefit.

To retrieve a previously saved Selection Expression, click the button to access the Retrieve Selection Expression dialog box, which lists the Selection Expressions saved in the current Project. Click the name of the desired Selection Expression to return to the Benefit Definition dialog box, where the Selection Expression is now entered in the expression box.