Pilkington Financial Services

Hi Adam, we are very sorry that you found this experience unpleasant and would like to express our sincere apologies to you and your spouse, the plan participant. To help clarify a few things, Pilkington Financial is the Financial Advisor to the plan in reference, not the administrator. There is a TPA (third party administrator) as well as another institution that custodies the assets. As the advisor, our firm is tasked with running enrollment meetings and providing investment education/advise to those participants seeking said advice. The employer offering the benefits is a nonprofit agency that has kindly provided its employees with a 3% match. As you know, there is no requirement for an employer to provide these types of benefits, but what you may not realize is that the cost to maintain a 403b or a 401k plan can be very significant, especially for smaller businesses and nonprofits with fewer plan assets. As a result, the cost is shared with employees through fund expenses, hence why they are higher than a plan offered by a large company through providers like Vanguard or Schwab. Aside from the fund fees, the cost for participants of this plan was only $4/year. Again, because this is a smaller plan, investment options are somewhat limited as a larger/more customized offering would increase overall costs to the employer, making the offer too expensive and potentially deterring the employer from offering any sort of benefit at all. Many employers feel that offering something, even with higher internal expenses, is better than offering nothing at all since the participant still gets “free money” from the match. As for the mistakes made when completing your paperwork, we do not receive a notice that the paperwork was incorrectly filled out, nor do we receive notice the funds were placed in a default fund. However, we confirmed with the custodian that they reached out to your spouse for 5 weeks to inform her of the mistakes, but never received a response and that’s why the funds were placed in the default fund. After Shanan corresponded with your wife about why the funds were placed in the default fund, she never heard anything back until 3 years later when you asked for documentation on the fees/plan documents/etc. which were provided to you within the day and the documents not readily available were provided to you within the week. During these interactions with your wife, she expressed that she “really appreciate(d)” Shanan’s responses, so we are confused as to why you think she was annoyed. Regardless, we are very sorry that you feel we did not provide enough assistance during enrollment and throughout your spouse’s time participating in the plan. We have had the privilege of serving our clients for nearly 45 years and have always strived to provide a high level of service, however, there may be times that we fall short of that goal, and for that we apologize.