Business abandoned retirement plan and left former employees owed thousands, feds say

A now-shuttered business in California’s Bay Area left its employees without retirement funds to rely on — for more than two decades, federal labor officials said.

Environmental Instrumentation Co., a scientific instrument company that was based in Concord, abandoned its retirement plan after the business shut down in 2002, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

The company’s retirement plan began in July 1988, a complaint filed in federal court in April by the U.S. Acting Secretary of Labor says.

Now, the Department of Labor has obtained a federal court judgment to recover thousands for four former company employees, the agency announced in an Aug. 30 news release.

These individuals are owed $153,768 in retirement funds, according to officials.

“Environmental Instrumentation Co. failed to uphold its legal obligation to administer its employees’ retirement plan assets,” Klaus Placke, the director of the Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration in San Francisco, said in a statement.

“Employees who expected that their retirement funds were protected as they faced unemployment found themselves unable to recover their retirement funds,” Placke said.

Contact information for Environmental Instrumentation Co. wasn’t immediately available or listed in court records.

The company was accused of violating the Employee Retirement Income Security Act by casting its retirement plan aside, according to officials.

The federal law, which went into effect in 1974, was established to protect retirement benefits of employees working in a private industry.

The U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California “issued a default judgment against” Environmental Instrumentation Co. — resulting in the appointment of a new fiduciary to oversee the formerly abandoned retirement plan, the release said.

AMI Benefit Plan Administrators Inc., based in Youngstown, Ohio, was selected as the fiduciary, according to officials.

Concord is about 30 miles northeast of San Francisco.

This story was originally published August 31, 2023 at 9:56 AM with the headline "Business abandoned retirement plan and left former employees owed thousands, feds say."

Julia Marnin

McClatchy DC

Julia Marnin covers courts for McClatchy News, writing about criminal and civil affairs, including cases involving policing, corrections, civil liberties, fraud, and abuses of power. As a reporter on McClatchy’s National Real-Time Team, she’s also covered the COVID-19 pandemic and a variety of other topics since joining in 2021, following a fellowship with Newsweek. Born in Biloxi, Mississippi, she was raised in South Jersey and is now based in New York State.