On Monday, the Supreme Court heard a case (LaRue v. DeWolff, Boberg & Associates Inc., No. 06-856) to consider whether individuals can sue if an employer or its agent mishandles a 401(k) account. The appeals court ruled that the applicable law only allows lawsuits when the whole plan is mismanaged, rather than individual accounts. As Linda Greenhouse reported,
Several justices pressed the lawyer on the other side, Thomas P. Gies, to explain what relief an employee in Mr. LaRue’s position might receive if he could not bring an individual lawsuit. Mr. Gies said that under a different section of Erisa, an employee could seek a court order for the mishandled trade to be executed.
“But it’s much too late,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg objected. “It’s over and done. It wasn’t made.”
That might be true, Mr. Gies acknowledged, but “Erisa is a statute that provides for limited remedies.”
“We think it’s unlikely,” he said, “that Congress intended every one of these ‘he said/she said’ cases to give rise to a cause of action for damages. There would be no end to the kinds of claims that one could imagine.”
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