FY26 PIMS Peer Review on Plan Sponsor Health

The Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act (MAP-21, Pub. L. No. 112-141) was enacted on July 6, 2012. Section 40233(a) of MAP-21 requires the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) to contract with a capable agency or organization that is independent of PBGC, to conduct annual peer reviews of the Single-Employer (SE) Pension Insurance Modeling System (PIMS) and Multiemployer (ME) PIMS. In practice, comprehensive reviews are conducted at least once every 5 years with targeted, more limited, reviews conducted in interim years. The focus of this Statement of Objectives (SOO) is a targeted review of SE PIMS and ME PIMS to be conducted in 2026-2027.

The PIMS models are used to develop PBGC’s annual Projections Report, a 10-year projection of the financial position of each of PBGC’s two insurance programs – the Single-Employer Program and the Multiemployer Program, and a long-term (40-year) evaluation of the solvency of the Multiemployer Program. PBGC also uses these forecasting models to analyze the potential effects of legislative proposals that impact private sector defined benefit plans and the insurance programs, as well as for additional budgeting and analysis internal to PBGC.

PBGC has deployed a new, modernized version of the SE PIMS model, which utilizes some alternative modeling assumptions and methods. As part of this deployment, PBGC constructed a new economic scenario generator; the resulting economic scenarios are used in both the SE PIMS and ME PIMS models. This targeted review covers the current versions of the SE PIMS model and the ME PIMS model; it does not cover the prior Legacy version of SE PIMS.

PBGC’s Board is seeking a qualified Contractor to perform a targeted peer review of the assumptions and methods used by the PIMS models to incorporate the financial health of plan sponsors in the projections. The remainder of this document sets forth PBGC’s specific expectations, while noting that PBGC would also welcome suggested refinements, based on the Contractor’s depth of experience and expertise in modeling defined benefit pension plans. PBGC will entertain proposed sub-contracting by the Contractor as needed to best accomplish the review.