Compliance February 24, 2025

Call Center Rep Accessed Data of More Than 2,000 Customers at Inspira Financial

The third-party call center representative improperly accessed personal data of retirement plan participants between December 2024 and January 2025.

Reported by

Inspira Financial Trust LLC—a provider of health, wealth, retirement and benefits solutions—on February 20 notified at least 2,308 retirement plan participants of a data breach, according to an alert on the Maine attorney general’s website. 

A third-party call center representative improperly accessed data relating to a “limited number of retirement accounts” operated by Inspira, according to the letter the company sent to affected participants.

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In January, according to the letter, Inspira—renamed from Millennium Trust Co. in January 2024—learned that the breach occurred between December 2024 and January 2025. The personal information accessed may have included participants’ names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, mailing addresses, previous employers, previous retirement plan sponsors, and Inspira account numbers, types and balances.

After learning of the issue, Inspira took steps to determine the nature and scope of the breach, the letter stated. The call center representative at issue is no longer an Inspira contractor, and the company is working with the call center vendor to ensure the breach has been reported to law enforcement authorities.

Inspira also flagged affected participants’ accounts for enhanced security review before any transactions can take place as an additional security measure. The hold is in place until participants verify their identity and direct Inspira to remove the flag.

Inspira is offering identity protection and credit monitoring services through Experian for two years at no cost to affected participants.

Inspira serves 8 million customers and institutional clients, and it custodies $63.1 billion in assets for them. Inspira did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the incident.

This breach comes just one week after The Pension Specialists Ltd., an independent retirement plan third-party administrator, disclosed a 2024 data breach in which more than 71,000 people had their personal information exposed. That incident was described as an external system breach or hacking.

Benefits February 21, 2025

What Happens to Federal Workers’ Thrift Savings Plan Assets After Being Terminated?

As government employees experience mass terminations, they await instructions on how to handle their retirement funds.

Reported by

Since President Donald Trump came into office, more than 200,000 federal workers at more than a dozen federal departments and agencies have been terminated from their jobs.

Many of these employees were also participants in the federal Thrift Savings Plan, the defined contribution retirement system for the federal workforce and some members of the military, and now have questions about what happens to their retirement savings and how they can continue to manage their accounts.

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The mass cuts stem mainly from efforts by the recently formed Department of Government Efficiency Service Temporary Service Organization, led by Elon Musk, to drastically downsize the federal government. On February 13, the Trump administration ordered agencies to lay off all probationary employees—generally, those on the job for less than one year and who have yet to gain civil service protection. According to government data maintained by the Office of Personnel Management, 220,000 federal employees had less than one year of experience in their job, as of March 2024.

About 75,000 federal employees also accepted offers of deferred resignations in exchange for financial incentives to leave their jobs by February 6.

The TSP operates similarly to a 401(k) in which the funds are held in a trust for each individual participant.

A spokesperson at the TSP said this week that any participant who separates from federal service should receive a notice that they do not need to take their assets out of the TSP. It is unclear whether the recently terminated employees have received any notices from TSP yet. Notification is largely dependent on the agency or service sending a separation code to the TSP, which may not happen for several days or weeks after a participant’s final working day, according to the spokesperson. Once the agency or service sends TSP the separation code, the TSP immediately notifies the participant.

While former employees can no longer make employee contributions, they can still manage their investment mix, transfer eligible money into their account and allow their investments to grow while taking advantage of the TSP’s low expenses.

The spokesperson said TSP participants can manage their accounts online, through an app or over the phone. He declined to provide any insight into or estimate of the value of assets owned by terminated employees.

In February 2024, the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board reported that the plan had $845 billion in assets under management and approximately 7 million participants and beneficiaries at the end of 2023.

In 2022, the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board awarded a new recordkeeping contract to Accenture Federal Services.

When employees are covered by the Federal Employee Retirement System, which includes the TSP, they receive agency automatic contributions of 1% and agency contributions matching their own contributions. Agency contributions stop when an employee is no longer being paid status.

According to the fact sheet “Information for TSP Participants Leaving Federal Employment” posted on the TSP.gov website, if participants have TSP loans when they separate from federal employment, they must decide if they want to pay them off, keep them open and set up monthly repayments or allow them to be foreclosed and accept the outstanding balance and accrued interest as taxable income.

The IRS began laying off more than 6,000 new and newly promoted employees on Thursday, and cuts have also been made at the Social Security Administration. The acting commissioner of the SSA resigned last week after refusing to give DOGE employees access to beneficiary information. The Department of Labor and the Department of the Treasury appear to have not yet been hit, but cuts are expected to continue across agencies.

Several unions representing federal employees filed a complaint on Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to block the mass firings of probationary federal workers by the Trump administration, alleging that the firings are illegal and that officials are exploiting and misusing the probationary period to eliminate staff.

On Thursday, District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled that a different complaint filed in the District of Columbia by the National Treasury Employees Union must be heard by the Federal Labor Relations Authority, rather than the U.S. District Court, which Cooper wrote “likely lacks subject matter jurisdiction.”

The unions are seeking an injunction to stop more firings and to rescind those that have already happened.

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