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The article that I found for this week's discussion is titled, "MetLife Agrees to $10 Million SEC Fine Over Pension-Related Accounting Violations." The article covers the charges brought against Met Life by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for violating internal accounting controls related to its reserves held for pension-related liabilities. Essentially, over the course of an approximately 25-year period, Met Life had responsibility over a number of private-sector pensions plans and failed to make adequate efforts to locate eligible employees when payments were due. After only two mailing attempts, if there was no answer, the individuals were deemed as deceased or unresponsive, the reserves were improperly released, and the company would record them as profit.

Met Life would later deem its processes for locating and reaching unresponsive beneficiaries as insufficient. A second article highlights additional internal control deficiencies, such as the failure to locate any record of "the actual policy stating under what circumstances it was deemed appropriate to release reserves" and the absence of any "legal review or due diligence performed to approve the policy" (Jacko, 2020). Over the 25-year period, it was also mentioned that questions were raised by employees related to the practices for releasing reserves, but these questions never reached senior management. Deficiencies such as these resulted in Met Life reducing its liabilities and improperly reclassifying them as income, which ultimately created material misstatements within its financial statements. In 2017, Met Life attempted to correct this error by increasing its reserves by $510 million (Chin, 2019).

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