VOYA Financial Accused of Charging Retirement Plan Members Excessive Fees

New to ClassAction.org? Read our Newswire Disclaimer

VOYA Financial, Inc. and VOYA Retirement Insurance and Annuity Company are on the receiving end of a proposed class action that claims they charged “undisclosed excessive and unreasonable” fees for providing administrative services to the members of a retirement plan. According to the suit, VOYA based its recordkeeping costs on the amount of assets in the Cornerstone Pediatric Profit Sharing Plan rather than the number of participants, charging approximately $1,466 per participant in 2014 and $1,819 in 2015, when a recent survey revealed that the median cost of recordkeeping for those years was about $64 per participant. Because the fees are asset-based, they continually increase without requiring any additional services on the defendants’ part, the complaint explains. “For this reason,” it reads, “responsible recordkeepers charge recordkeeping fees for each plan participant rather than as a percentage of plan assets.”

The suit argues that the defendants attempted to conceal from plan members the allegedly excessive fees by adding them to the operating costs of each mutual fund option offered in the plan. The complaint notes that though the changes were small, they can result in “vast differences” in the amounts available to plan participants when they retire years later. Thus, the suit alleges, the plaintiff and proposed class members were essentially robbed of their retirement savings through VOYA’s supposedly deceptive conduct.