I worked my entire law enforcement career in Chico, a small, sleepy town in Northern California. Generally speaking, I think the citizens were quite supportive of their police department. I never really felt like I needed to look over my shoulder when I was off duty.
Unfortunately, it’s not that way in many areas of California. Our profession faces myriad security challenges, both professional and personal. Sometimes it just boils down to the simplest of reasons — some of the bad guys out there just don’t like us or our chosen profession. So cops need to evaluate the risks they personally face, as well as those affecting their family members.
Many choose to try and fade out of the picture. One way to do that is to scrub your information from the internet. Don’t advertise your address, phone numbers or email address. Depending upon what method you use, or what service you subscribe to, it can truly be a very effective tool. I call it hiding from the bad guys. It’s a pretty cheap way to offer some basic form of protection.
By now you are probably asking, “What does this have to do with the Retiree Medical Trust?” That is a great question.
The RMT is what is known as an ERISA trust. That stands for Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which became federal law in 1974. ERISA sets minimum standards for our type of plan. Among those standards is the responsibility to make multiple attempts to locate missing participants. For us, we consider participants in the RMT missing when we no longer have a valid mailing address at which we can reach you. When mail we send you is returned as undeliverable, you become a missing participant. We call it MP for short.
Now, be assured that we want you to take any and all precautions to protect you and your family. The problem is that when you hide from the bad guys, you likewise (unintentionally) hide from the good guys. Internet scrubs don’t discriminate. We can’t find you either.
Unfortunately, we end up spending both time and money trying to locate people who are hiding. We throw money at skip tracers who really don’t have much incentive to find people. Rather, they get paid for their attempts to find people.
This year, the RMT decided to make a concerted effort to find our MPs. Each of them has a benefit available to them — it’s their money, and we felt it was important to do what we could to connect them with it.
It’s taken some time, but we have whittled the 2024 list down from 368 to fewer than 190 MPs. We are almost halfway there. The stark reality is that we may never find every single one of them. Name changes (think marriage) complicate the search, some MPs have passed away without our knowledge, and others are excellent at hiding and rarely come up for air.
But there is something you can do to help us out. If you participate in the RMT, please register your account with us. Go to our website at poracrmt.org. Click the Member Login button, and it will take you to our SIMON platform page. There, you can register your account.
As part of that process, you can provide us with all of your contact information. And while you are there, give us the name of your spouse (if any) as well as any dependent children.
There really is no need to wait until you retire. Once we get notice from your employer that you have separated, the Trust needs to send you (by snail mail) a correspondence packet. It’s imperative that you receive this information.
Please, by all means, keep hiding from the bad guys. But let the RMT know where your hiding place is. We are really good at keeping secrets.
If you have any questions or concerns, you have one additional option. Get ahold of me, and I will do my best to assuage your fears.
If you weren’t at the annual Conference in Palm Desert, then you missed the following numbers here and in the chart on the opposite page:
- 8,091 total participants
- 63 participating associations in three states
- $151 million in assets (as of December 4, 2024)
We don’t have anything to sell to your association. What we would love to do is share the value of planning ahead for your medical expenses in retirement.
