Opinion ID: 172853
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Plan is Ambiguous

Text: The ExxonMobil Pension Plan [6] provides that generally a person acquires a matured right to a Pension Benefit at the time of termination if the person was a covered employee  and the person has completed sufficient years of service. [7] (Aplt.App.84.). The Common Provisions [8] applicable to the Pension Plan define a covered employee, in general, as a qualifying employee ... of a participating employer. ( Id. at 302 (emphasis omitted.)) The definitions of qualifying employee and participating employer incorporate further definitions: a qualifying employee is defined, in general, as any employee of a participating employer who ... is both a regular employee and a domestic-type employee [9] ( Id. at 312-13); and a participating employer is, in general, ExxonMobil and any service-oriented employer that has elected to participate in one or more of the benefit plans. [10] (2 Aplt.App. 311.) Therefore, ultimately, a covered employee is, generally, a full-time employee of ExxonMobil who is compensated in U.S. Dollars and is regularly stationed in the United States or Canada. Despite all of these definitions, the pivotal term employee is never specifically defined, and neither was the term defined in any previous version of the Plans. (The Plan asserts that only a person who was on ExxonMobil's payroll meets the definition of an employee under the benefit plans) (Aple. Br. at 44); to the contrary, Scruggs argues that the term employee has a broader scope that reaches common-law employees, as defined under Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. v. Darden, 503 U.S. 318, 112 S.Ct. 1344, 117 L.Ed.2d 581 (1992), and possibly extends still more widely. [11] To be sure, each of the interpretations proposed by the parties is plausible, and the benefit plans neither specifically include nor exclude common-law employees. Furthermore, a holistic reading of the plan documents is equivocal. On the one hand, the plan documents' specific exclusion of certain individuals who would not be on ExxonMobil's payroll, such as leased employees and some special-agreement person[s], could imply that absent the exclusion they might fall under the definition of a qualifying employee even though they were not on ExxonMobil's payroll. On the other hand, the plan documents at least suggest that a person who is not paid through the established wage or salary system, i.e., the payroll system, could not accrue any benefits. [12] (Aplt.App.307.) It would make little sense to characterize as a covered employee a person who is not eligible to receive benefits because he or she was not on the payroll. Because the term employee is ambiguous and the plan documents as a whole do not establish a definitive interpretation, it is appropriate to proceed to consider the reasonableness of the administrator's exercise of his interpretive discretion.