Dear School District Superintendents, Charter School and Education Collaborative Directors, Business Managers, Payroll Officers, Personnel Administrators and Town Treasurers,
Please note our annual fall reminders regarding retiree insurance processing:
- Group insurance rate changes for January: Beat the rush! Please send your new senior rates to us ASAP so everyone’s changes can be processed on time.
If you have already submitted your group insurance rate changes for January, thank you; if not, at your earliest convenience, please complete our group rate premium rate change form and e-mail it to insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us.
After we complete your rate change request, we will send you an e-mail notifying you that your request has been processed. Once you have been contacted, please sign into MyTRS and confirm that we entered your changes correctly; by proactively verifying your requested changes, you will prevent a small typo or oversight from becoming a large issue for your retired employees. (Please note that group rate changes are updated overnight, so you will not see the corrected rate until the day after we processed your changes.) If you discover an issue with the rate change, please e-mail us at insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us, with a subject of “RATE ERROR FOUND,” and we will give your message high priority in processing.
As we’re sure you know, however, the annual processing of January insurance rate changes makes this one of the busiest times of the year for you and for us. Please be assured that we will make every effort to enter group rate changes into MyTRS before our December warrant is processed and the deductions for January are withheld.
For the past few years, we have processed all of your on-time rate change submissions so that they were reflected in the month they took effect, and together we can keep the streak going!
- Setting up brand new retirees for insurance deductions: We now “enable” the insurance set up in MyTRS for new, soon-to-be retirees when we receive their retirement applications, so you no longer need to e-mail us to request this.
When retiree insurance access in MyTRS was first rolled out in February 2015, we asked employers to e-mail the MTRS to “enable” new retirees who qualify for insurance coverage. In the summer of 2015, we implemented a new process to allow us to “enable” all new retirees when their retirement applications are first received by the MTRS. Accordingly, you no longer need to e-mail us before you can set up new retirees for insurance deductions.
However, for existing retirees who are obtaining any kind of coverage for the first time–or if it appears that we accidentally forgot to enable a retiree for you–you will still need to send an e-mail to our insurance updates box, with a subject of “ENABLE RETIREE.” This is still required for some existing retirees if they retired before we implemented the process of setting them up upon receipt of a retirement application.
- Reminder regarding rate-wide premium insurance “holidays”: Since July 1, 2015, the MTRS no longer enters these, as employers can process them in MyTRS.
With direct access to retiree insurance functions in MyTRS, districts that would like to offer premium “holidays” can now process them in one sitting–simply sign into MyTRS, enter a stop on retirees’ deductions and, at the same time, enter a new rate line to restart the deductions a month later. With this process, you have full control over the rate “holiday” and avoid any complications that batch processing can present.