What to do when a USICG account holder dies

USICG serves distribution paperwork per plan, not per company. To open the forms portal at https://forms.usicg.com/distr_forms.asp you must supply the three-digit Plan ID number and the first three alpha characters of the plan name, both of which appear on the participant's account statement. The public route to that gate, https://www.usicg.com/direct-solutions/distribution-forms/, first asks whether your home address is U.S. or non-U.S. and requires you to acknowledge the 402(f) Special Tax Notice before the forms unlock. Executors and beneficiaries should therefore find a recent statement, or get the plan code from HR, before trying to start a claim.

USICG's 401(k) Program Application for Death Benefit form (Rev. 02/2025) has several requirements that trip people up. A SEPARATE form must be completed for each beneficiary, and all of them must be submitted together. A copy of the death certificate must be attached, and USICG will not process the request until it also has a copy of the beneficiary's driver's license or other identifying document. The beneficiary's signature must be handwritten: the form states that typed signatures are not valid and will not be accepted. If a beneficiary takes payment directly rather than rolling it over, 20 percent mandatory federal income tax withholding applies and cannot be waived. A direct rollover must be accompanied by a signed acceptance from the receiving custodian, and a non-spouse beneficiary may roll only to an Inherited IRA, not to an employer plan.

No. An employer-sponsored retirement plan account cannot be retitled into a living trust while you are alive: the plan is a trust in its own right, the account is held for you as a participant, and transferring it would be a taxable distribution. The estate-planning lever is the beneficiary designation. You can name your revocable trust as the beneficiary of a 401(k), 403(b), 457, ESOP, or defined benefit death benefit by supplying the trust name, the date it was established, the trustee name or names, and the trust EIN. USICG's own participant guide points out the reason this matters most: most retirement plans will not pay money directly to a minor, so a court appoints a trustee or guardian to receive it, and naming a trust for the benefit of your children as beneficiary is how you avoid that delay.

Usually, yes. USICG's participant guide states plainly that if you are married, many retirement plans require you to name your spouse as the primary beneficiary, and that naming someone else is possible only if your spouse signs a consent waiving their rights to your plan assets. On a defined benefit or cash balance plan, the survivor annuity rules give the spouse a default entitlement (the qualified preretirement survivor annuity if you die before benefits start, or the survivor portion of the qualified joint and survivor annuity if payments have begun), and a valid waiver is required to displace it. The plan document, not USICG, sets whether that consent must be notarized or witnessed by a plan representative. Name a trust as primary beneficiary without your spouse's valid consent and the plan will generally pay the spouse anyway.

USICG consults heavily on defined benefit plan terminations and pension risk transfers, and the survivor benefit follows the liability. On a standard termination the plan either pays lump sums or buys a group annuity contract from an insurer (USICG provides annuity placement consulting for exactly this step), and once the liability transfers, a surviving spouse or beneficiary claims from the annuity provider rather than from the former plan or from USICG. Your qualified preretirement survivor annuity rights and the beneficiary designation on file are carried through the termination rather than extinguished by it. If the participant dies during the wind-down, keep the plan termination notices: they identify the insurer the beneficiary must now contact.