Retirement Income. 1984 Pension Law Will Help Some Widows but Not the Poorest

This report was prepared in partial fulfillment of the requirement under the Retirement Equity Act of 1984 that GAO study the effects of federal pension legislation on women and report the results to your Committees. The report analyzes the potential effects on windows income of the spousal consent provision of the Retirement Equity Act. This provision requires that a married participant in a private pension plan obtain the spouses consent before choosing a payout often option that does not provide survivor benefits for the spouse. Although the economic status of the population age 65 and over has improved substantially in the past 25 years, elderly widows continue to have a risk of being poor. REA requires that GAO study the effect of federal pension legislation on women and report to five congressional committees. For this review, GAO investigated the potential of the spousal consent requirement for improving the economic status of future windows. GAOs principal objectives were to determine 1 how many wives could gain entitlement to survivor benefits as a result of REA 2 before REA, what economic circumstances seemed to influence whether survivor benefits were selected 3 how much additional income wives could receive from survivor benefits 4 whether many of those most vulnerable to poverty will be helped by increased access to survivor benefits and 5 to what extent increased access to survivor benefits will lessen widows dependence on social security.