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MetLife Inc. said that roughly 13,500 workers were left without their monthly retirement benefits over the past quarter century because of a records mistake, the first time the insurance giant disclosed the specific number of people affected by the pension snafu, the Wall Street Journal reported. In a regulatory filing on Tuesday, MetLife attributed the problems to a policy established 25 years ago to contact would-be pension recipients twice, rather than employing aggressive search techniques to track down people and make them aware of their eligibility for monthly income. It then shrank balance-sheet reserves that reflected MetLife’s payment obligation to these people. The company also said it lacked a system under which details about the missing payments were escalated throughout the company. At least some top executives, the company has previously said, didn’t become aware of the problems until last fall.

MetLife Inc said on Monday that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission was looking into the insurer’s failure to pay some workers’ pensions, Reuters reported. MetLife, in a statement, said the SEC’s enforcement staff has inquired about payments that the insurer failed to make for people who receive a type of annuity benefit from the company via its retirement business. Less than 5 percent of 600,000 people are affected, the company has said. The New York insurer estimated increasing total reserves by between $525 million and $575 million on a pre-tax basis, resulting in a hit to fourth-quarter earnings of $135 million to $165 million. Last month, MetLife said it failed to pay pensions to possibly tens of thousands of people and would have to strengthen its reserves because of the costs of finding and repaying them. “To date, MetLife is not aware of any intentional wrongdoing in connection with this matter,” the company said on Monday, adding that it was responding to the SEC’s questions.

Patriot National Inc. filed for bankruptcy under a prearranged plan to hand control of its hobbled insurance-outsourcing business to lenders Cerberus Capital Management LP and TCW Asset Management Co., WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., company entered a chapter 11 process in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., stemming from the insolvency of its largest customer, a messy fallout with its former chief executive and mounting lawsuits from stockholders, employees and attorneys. Cerberus and Carlyle Group-backed TCW are poised to take control of Patriot National under a prenegotiated plan that would convert $223 million in debt to new equity, chief restructuring officer James Feltman said in a sworn declaration.

A federal appeals court yesterday dismissed a case involving MetLife Inc.’s designation as a “systemically important financial institution,” the last step in the insurer’s path to shedding the label, the Wall Street Journal reported. The move by a panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit came in response to the Trump administration’s decision last week to end the government’s appeal of the case. MetLife was designated as “systemically important” in 2014 by the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a body that includes the heads of financial regulatory agencies and an independent member representing the insurance industry. The insurer challenged the label in court and won in early 2016, when U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer ordered the label to be rescinded. The oversight council had appealed Judge Collyer’s decision during the end of the Obama administration.

Loans late by 90 days or more are increasingly concentrated in parts of Florida, Georgia and southeast Texas as fallout from the storms continues to weigh on the market, National Mortgage News reported. Florida displaced Mississippi as the state with the biggest percentage of severe delinquencies during the month as a result, according to Black Knight's "First Look" report for December 2017. A total of 726,000 properties were 90 or more days past due, but not yet in foreclosure, last month. Of those, 142,000 are attributed to damage from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. That raises the percentage of severely delinquent loans attributed to the two storms to almost 20 percent from less than 13 percent the previous month. Overall, severe delinquencies were up by 60,000 from November 2017 and 44,000 from December 2016 due to a combination of hurricane-related fallout and seasonal factors.

The U.S. government and MetLife Inc announced yesterday that they would jointly seek to dismiss an appeal over whether the insurance company should face stricter oversight as a key part of the financial system. MetLife and the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a top federal panel of financial regulators, filed a joint motion to dismiss an earlier FSOC appeal, the company announced in a statement. Backers of tougher rules established after the 2007-2009 financial crisis insist allowing regulators to identify specific firms for stricter scrutiny as key cogs of the financial system is a critical tool. But conservative critics argued the FSOC applied the power in an inconsistent and opaque fashion. In November, the Treasury Department recommended the FSOC shift away from singling out specific companies, and instead focus on broader risks facing the financial system.