Dependent Verification Services

Aon Hewitt's Plan-Smart® and Plan-Guard® dependent eligibility solutions help companies verify that eligible dependents maintain access to anticipated benefits and costly, ineligible dependents are removed from coverage as quickly as possible. Plan-Smart performs a complete audit of an enrolled dependent population. Plan-Guard's ongoing dependent verification services preserve the integrity of the benefit plans on an ongoing basis and protect the results of the comprehensive audit.

Employees' dependents drive up to 70 percent of a company's health care costs, but in extreme cases, as many as 15 percent of dependents may actually be ineligible for coverage because of age, marital status or failure to qualify as a legal dependent. Carrying all those extra people can add thousands—if not millions—to your annual benefit costs. Verifying dependent eligibility, however, can be time-consuming and complicated for your HR staff.

Aon Hewitt's Dependent Verification Services can verify the eligibility of your employees' dependents, eliminating that potentially tedious task from your HR staff's responsibilities. Our knowledgeable and experienced benefit professionals ensure a smooth verification process and measurable results. Working with Aon Hewitt enables you to manage eligibility issues in a more objective environment, which helps mitigate potential participant concerns about sharing sensitive, personal information with their employer.

With Aon Hewitt's Dependent Verification Services, you can:

• Reduce future dependent health care costs
• Improve employee understanding of what's driving health care costs
• Reduce compliance risk under Sarbanes-Oxley, ERISA and DOL guidelines

Our Dependent Verification Services can be customized with options such as one-time or periodic verification, full population or random sample of plan participants or an initial amnesty period that allows employees to voluntarily drop ineligible dependents.

A wide variety of companies have used Aon Hewitt's Dependent Verification Services to verify eligibility among active, inactive, retiree and COBRA populations. With an average reduction in the number of eligible dependents of 8 percent for the initial audit and two to three times that percentage on an ongoing basis, the resulting cost savings are substantial.