Profiting from death? Lawsuit filed in Wal-Mart life insurance case

Here's one

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/business/7672530.htm

Wal-Mart settles lawsuit over insurance policies on workers

DAVID KOENIG

Associated Press

DALLAS - Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has settled a lawsuit over its practice of taking out life insurance on employees and making itself the beneficiary.

The settlement with families of employees who died was reached hours before a federal appeals court ruled against the giant retailer. Terms of the deal, reached Monday, were not disclosed.

Wal-Mart officials said the settlement could benefit relatives of 150 to 500 employees although only about six families were part of the lawsuit.

The families said that Wal-Mart never told workers about the life insurance policies - Wal-Mart disputes that claim - and said they were enraged that the company profited but they received nothing from the proceeds.

"A large percentage of the population doesn't approve of the morality or the ethics of this type of conduct," Mike Myers, a Houston attorney for the families, said Friday. "My clients' reaction, when they found out, was stunned and disbelief, turning to frustration and anger."

The relatives sued in 2001 in Houston, and U.S. District Judge Nancy F. Atlas sided with the families, ruling in effect that Texas law limited such policies to key employees.

Wal-Mart appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. But lawyers for the company and the relatives reached a settlement hours before the court issued its ruling Monday, upholding the victory by relatives and saying that Wal-Mart "unlawfully took funds that, under Texas law, rightfully belonged" to a dead worker's estate.

Mona Williams, a spokeswoman for Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart, said the company was pleased to end the litigation and expected the district court to approve the settlement. Wal-Mart says it lost $100 million on the policies and unwound them in 2000 after court decisions took away tax advantages.

Wal-Mart is suing AIG and Hartford Life, which sold the policies, to force them to pay Wal-Mart's losses and additional expenses - potentially including the cost of Monday's settlement.

Wal-Mart is one of many large U.S. companies in recent years that have taken out policies on the lives of employees, ranging from executives to workers on the bottom rungs of the pay ladder, with the goal of collecting benefits when the employees die. Companies term the policies corporate-owned life insurance, or COLIs. Critics call them dead-peasant policies.

Wal-Mart set up a trust in 1993 and named itself as beneficiary on policies for 355,000 employees.

The policies are legal in Texas if the worker is so important that his death would cause financial harm to the company.

Douglas Sims was a Wal-Mart employee from 1987 until he died of a heart attack in 1998. His widow, Jane, sued Wal-Mart after discovering the existence of the policy in 2001 and was one of the plaintiffs in Monday's settlement.

"They used my husband," Jane Sims told NBC News last year. "It's wrong. It's morally wrong."

Wal-Mart tried to get the lawsuit thrown out, but Judge Atlas ruled in her favor. The judge, however, let Wal-Mart appeal on several grounds including whether Wal-Mart had enough interest in Sims' life to be able to insure him.

Monday's settlement followed "extensive and long-term negotiations," said Myers.

Hartford Life, the original defendant in the lawsuit, was not involved in the settlement.

In recent years, Wal-Mart and other companies have been suffered legal and public-relations setbacks over the dead-peasant policies.

Myers' law firm, McClanahan & Clearman of Houston, is also suing Dow Chemical Co. in federal district court in Houston. The firm lost a case against San Antonio-based SBC Communications Inc. because the family waited too long after the worker's death to protest.

The policies recently became a political issue in Texas. Retired state employees in Texas protested last year when a legislator suggested giving the state the ability to secretly insure the retirees' lives.

State Rep. Ken Marchant, R-Coppell, quickly withdrew the idea, which was pitched by Phil Gramm, the former Republican U.S. senator from Texas who now works for the investment banking firm UBS. Gramm told state officials that proceeds from the practice could be earmarked for the teachers' retirement system.

Posted on Fri, Jan. 09, 2004

It's also a very old story.

So what was the point in bringing it up now?

Why not find a follow up on this court case before accusing people of lies......

The article you posted says nothing about WalMart secretly taking out the life insurance policies on the workers lives. That's because it didn't happen. Insurance law prevents it from happening. Law is for the law abiding of course and WalMart obeyed the law. WalMart paid the premiums, and whether the premiums were taken as a tax deduction or not, morally, the proceeds belonged to WalMart.

The jist of the article you posted is this: Relatives of the dead employees were angry that they didn't recieve the death benefit (even though they weren't entitled to it) and managed to raise a stink in the press to the level that the company saw a PR disaster. What the EE's families did was immoral and unethical, but they prevailed. They managed to steal from WalMart and not get punished. Laws are for the law abiding, of course, and these families wanted to be lawbreakers. The death benfit they recieved was a gift from WalMart, not something they earned or even deserved.

I suspect the reason you made up all the stuff you did in your posts was because you don;t have any good, logical, arguments why WalMart should be taken down. You are then forced to make up stuff, misrepresent the truth into lies (as you did) and generally paint WalMart as evil.

As a Freeper, you should feel shame for what you've done. Obviously, I won't hold my breath. Your posts revel to what level you will desend to harm WalMart. I see a lot of that kind of stuff posted over at the DUmmie site too. It's hard to tell your posts apart from theirs.

Wal-Mart did violate Texas law by taking out life insurance policies on non-key employees.

As an insurance broker, the issuing company would have reprimanded me (at least) for even writing an application on a non-key employee.

It is the obligation of the writing agent to point out to the policy owner (in this case Wal-Mart) that there must be an insurable interest before a policy will be issued. If the writing agent doesn't catch it, the underwriting department is the next level where those kinds of mistakes are stopped.

I don't write on large companies like Wal-Mart, but it looks to me that Wal-Mart got a raw deal here.

One: It was the life insurance companies responsibility to decline to write and issue the policies, not Wal-Mart’s.

Two: Once written, Wal-Mart was the owner and premium payer, not the employees or the families.

Three: Dollars to donuts Wal-Mart had to pay gift taxes (about a 50% tax rate) on the death benefit that Wal-Mart was wrongfully forced to give to the employees families. A $100,000 death benefit to the family (remember that $100,000 was legally and morally Wal-Mart’s) also cost Wal-Mart an additional $50,000 in taxes.

One winner though, Wal-Mart bashers, like youself and those over at the DUmmie site.

I'll stay on the morally correct side.

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