LANSING - For better or worse, the pension plan administration business ain't what it used to be.

The 900-page Pension Protection Act (PPA) of 2006 has done a number on the numbers business involved with pension administration, imposing new accounting rules, changing funding requirements for plans, and establishing benchmarks for plans to show they are staying solvent.

The ultimate goal of the Pension Protection Act, said Randy DeFrehn, executive director of the National Coordinating Committee for Multi-Employer Plans (NCCMP), is simply to keep financially faltering pension plans away from being bailed out by taxpayers. DeFrehn gave a presentation on the pension administration business to the Michigan Building and Construction Trades Council Legislative Conference on April 16.

The NCCMP, a nonprofit group funded by unions, advocates and lobbies for multi-employer pensions, which includes all construction union plans. Life was easier for pension trustees until earlier this decade, when work opportunities dried up, workers retired at greater rates and the stock market took a dive. All those factors caused under-funding in some pension plans, and prompted Congress to look closer at how pension plans were being funded and managed.

DeFrehn said "the most onerous provisions" of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 apply to single-employer plans like those in the troubled steel and airline industries. "Multi-employer plans were treated more favorably because of labor-management support," he said.

Still, DeFrehn said, neither labor nor management multi-employer pension plan trustees would have endorsed the Pension Protection Act that was approved by Congress and signed by the president. He said the final plan is a mixture of compromises that are essentially aimed at beefing up the bottom lines of the relatively small number of plans that are "severely under-funded" - at a cost to more solvent plans.

About 70 percent of multi-employer pension plans "don't have a problem," with funding, DeFrehn said. Between 20-25 percent of such plans are in a "Yellow Zone" which means they may face a funding deficiency in less than seven years.

The "Red Zone" plans - 5-10 percent of multi-employer plans - "drove the Pension Protection Act legislation," DeFrehn said. Their solvency is in the 60 percent range, and they may be facing a situation of poor work prospects and a high number of retirees vs. active workers.

Depending on what zone they fall in, pension plans now face various levels of requirements in order to satisfy federal regulators. They can range from requiring adoption of a federal improvement plan, to the imposition of federal benchmarks for plan funding, to restriction of benefits for members, to the imposition of surcharges on contributions to the funds in order to improve the fund's bottom line.

Timetables for plan improvements are also spelled out. The PPA also requires additional disclosures to stakeholders. And added communication between plan stakeholders and pension trustees - even "Monday-morning quarterbacking" DeFrehn said - "is essential now. People need to be talking to each other in order to do the right things for members and their employees."

For pension trustees, DeFrehn said, the Pension Protection Act "inspires grave new obligations to learn as much as possible" about the financial and legal environment for pension plans.

Michael Asher, a trust funds attorney, agreed, and told building trades delegates that for pension trustees and the money professionals they rely on, the PPA is good in one sense because it requires more transparency on plan funding situations. "But it also triggers more accountability," he said.