Dear School District Superintendents, Directors, Business Managers, Payroll Officials, Town Treasurers, Charter School and Education Collaborative Directors,
Note: If your district is one of the 47 districts currently participating in the GIC’s Retired Municipal Teacher (RMT) program, this update does not apply to you.
As you may know, in transitioning our retiree insurance change process to MyTRS, we have encountered technical challenges that have resulted in 10- to 12-week processing delays.
To address this situation—which is a top priority for us—we are taking the following steps:
- working with our vendor to fix the technical problems;
- redirecting staff resources to complete change requests more efficiently; and,
- as outlined below, implementing a new, standardized process for all districts to report individual and group insurance changes.
What this means for district insurance coordinators
As of Monday, March 10, all districts must submit changes as follows:
- All changes must be submitted using our newly reformatted MTRS pdf forms (or Excel templates), available at Reporting retiree insurance changes.
- All completed forms must be submitted via e-mail, to insuranceupdates@trb.state.ma.us. After Friday, March 14, 2014, faxes will no longer be accepted.
- When we have processed your changes, we will notify you by e-mail.
Additional notes and instructions
1. Please DO provide only the MTRS retiree’s name (unless the member’s spouse is also a MTRS retiree or a surviving beneficiary with his or her own MyTRS account).
2. Please do NOT:
-
- send duplicate, incomplete or faxed forms,
- e-mail full Social Security numbers (provide the last four digits only),
- include any calculations on the form (if a member requires a retroactive adjustment, provide the effective date only), or
- e-mail your forms to individual MTRS representatives, as they will be returned.
3. If you provide a retroactive date but have already refunded or billed the retiree, please make a note in the Comments box on the form.
4. If your request requires a retroactive correction, we will assume that we must process an adjustment for the bill or refund associated with the change based on the effective date of the change, unless it is otherwise stated on the request.
5. Reminder: Insurance deductions are always deducted one month prior to the effective period. For example, premiums for April are deducted in March.
Thank you for your assistance with our new rate change submission procedure, and for your patience as we resolve the technical issues.