JPMorgan Chase has refused to pay out an estimated $331-a-month pension to the widow of one of the bank’s former longtime employees — with the excuse that he failed to fill out the necessary paperwork before his untimely death, The Post has learned.
Melvyn Silverberg, who worked for a decade as a systems analyst at Chase Manhattan Bank until 1979, died unexpectedly at age 43 in 1988 from multiple organ failure. Chase Manhattan went on to merge with JPMorgan in 2000.
Elaine Silverberg, 73, told The Post she has been battling the Wall Street giant for more than 13 years to recover her late husband’s pension pot following her own retirement. She was just 37 at the time of Mel’s death, which left her to raise their three kids alone.
But America’s biggest bank, whose profits surpassed $12 billion from the third quarter amid a surge in investment banking fees, has refused to cough up from the $53,000 pension pot amassed by her husband, which has been sitting untouched for more than 35 years.
Officials at the Social Security Administration estimate the untapped account to be worth $331 a month, according to a letter sent to Mel’s widow by the federal agency reviewed by this outlet.
‘If Jamie Dimon were aware of this, he would wish to do the right thing and honor the pension,” Silverberg told The Post, referring to JPMorgan Chase’s longtime CEO.
“Nothing is stopping them from doing so,” she said. “You would think the bank would want to do the right thing. They have treated me like an insignificant cockroach just to be stepped on.”
JPMorgan Chase acknowledges that her husband earned a vested retirement package before leaving the bank. But the bank also says Mel failed to fill out a form that elected her to benefit from his pension upon his death.
The Reagan administration passed the Retirement Equity Act in 1984 to ensure spouses like Elaine would automatically benefit if their loved ones passed away. But because Mel died before the change in the law, the bank argues Elaine isn’t entitled to a cent.
“While we sympathize with Mrs. Silverberg, she is asking us to pay without necessary documentation,” a JPMorgan spokesperson said. “We follow the terms of our pension plan that would not permit individual exceptions.”
Correspondence reviewed by The Post shows that JPMorgan claims it contacted Mr Silverberg three times to ask him about electing for spousal coverage, including on one occasion in 1990 — two years after he died.
The firm said it had not been informed about his passing at the time.
But Christopher Dagg, a senior staff attorney at the Mid-Atlantic Pension Counseling Project, an organization that defends former employees and their families in pension disputes, told The Post that the bank’s argument is “weak.”
“We regularly see this recurring problem, where a retirement plan cannot prove it sent a participant an important document, but claims it had a procedure in place to try to shift the burden of proof onto the participant, who must then try to prove a negative years later,” he said.
Elaine even enlisted New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and Eliot Engel, formerly a Congressman from New York, to try and convince JP Morgan to back off its hardline stance on Mel’s retirement fund.
“His spouse deserves the pension he worked so diligently towards,” Engel, who left office in 2021, wrote four years earlier in a letter seen by The Post.
“Mrs Silverberg was informed by several employees at Chase she qualified for her spouse’s pension on many occasions,” Engel wrote.
Elazer Lew, one of Mel’s former coworkers, hit out at JPMorgan Chase, saying that Elaine’s late husband would be “rolling in his grave” if he knew how his widow was being treated by the bank.
Elaine, who retired from her job as an administrator for the New York State Assembly in Albany in 2011, added that she cannot afford to hire hotshot lawyers to take on one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world.
“This is a lot of money to me. For them it’s just a joke,” Silverberg said. “I feel like Mel would be mortified about what they are doing to me.”
“I am not destitute, but this was never an issue about poverty — only justice,” she told The Post.