New York Life Insurance Company lawsuits over the past three decades have targeted the insurer for 401(k) self-dealing, “vanishing premium” sales practices, unpaid life insurance benefits to deceased policyholders’ families, misleading annuity disclosures, and investment-fund fee misrepresentations. Tracked penalties and settlements against the company and its subsidiaries exceed $70 million since 2000, spread across more than two dozen regulatory and private actions. The largest recent payout is the $19 million Krohnengold ERISA settlement in 2024; the largest historical case is the 1995 vanishing premium class action, which delivered an estimated $250 million or more in benefits to roughly 3.2 million policyholders.
Krohnengold 401(k) Self-Dealing Settlement
The most significant recent case accused New York Life of stuffing its own employees’ retirement plans with inferior in-house investment products. Krohnengold v. New York Life Insurance Company (Case No. 1:21-cv-01778) was filed on March 2, 2021, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs alleged violations of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, claiming the company and its 401(k) plan trustees breached their fiduciary duties of loyalty and prudence.
Two forms of self-dealing sat at the center of the complaint. New York Life defaulted plan participants into its “Fixed Dollar Account,” a stable value fund the complaint described as undiversified and low-return, which allegedly funneled roughly $2.36 billion in employee assets back to the company for its own business purposes. Separately, the company populated the plan menus with its own “MainStay” brand mutual funds instead of better-performing, lower-cost options from unaffiliated managers, generating what the plaintiffs called “windfall profits” through management fees collected by New York Life affiliates.
Two plans were covered: a $4.1 billion employee plan and a $930 million plan for agents. The class included more than 40,000 current and former workers who held assets in the challenged funds between March 2, 2015, and the settlement date. New York Life agreed to pay $19 million, which plaintiffs’ counsel characterized as 20 to 25 percent of estimated plan losses. Judge Jesse M. Furman granted final approval on July 18, 2024. Participants who had been defaulted into the Fixed Dollar Account received payouts weighted at 1.5 times the standard rate.
Mehling ERISA Lawsuit
Krohnengold was not the first time New York Life faced accusations of mismanaging its employees’ retirement money. Mehling v. New York Life Insurance Co. (Civil Action No. 99-5417) was filed in federal court in the late 1990s, alleging the company violated ERISA by investing pension funds exclusively in its own mutual funds while ignoring consultant advice to shift to lower-cost separately managed accounts. The complaint originally included RICO racketeering claims, which were dismissed in 2005, leaving the ERISA counts.
The case settled for $14 million. Under terms approved by Judge Bruce W. Kauffman of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, 70 percent of the fund (about $9.8 million) went to eligible participants in the company’s 401(k) plans who held balances between 1994 and 2005, while 30 percent (about $4.2 million) went to strengthen the funding of the company’s defined-benefit pension plans. Roughly 35,000 people were eligible for the 401(k) portion and about 32,000 for the pension portion. New York Life also agreed to retain independent fiduciary consultants for its retirement plans through May 2010. Final approval came after a hearing on January 22, 2008.
Vanishing Premium Class Action
One of the earliest major lawsuits against New York Life was a nationwide class action over “vanishing premium” life insurance policies. During the 1980s and early 1990s, agents sold whole life policies with the promise that future dividends would eventually cover premiums entirely, allowing policyholders to stop paying. When investment returns declined, those projections fell short, and customers discovered they would need to keep paying far longer than promised.
The suit alleged that New York Life and its agents failed to properly disclose how sensitive premium projections were to market conditions. With approximately 3.2 million policyholders in the class, it was the first settlement of a nationwide class action involving vanishing premium products. In 1995, New York Life agreed to a settlement expected to provide $250 million or more in benefits to eligible customers who purchased participating policies between 1982 and 1994. Relief came as low-interest loans or additional credits toward life insurance or annuity values, with individual amounts ranging from $50 to tens of thousands of dollars depending on the size and age of the policy. The settlement also established an arbitration process for complaints about other improper sales practices, including policy churning and misrepresentation of insurance as retirement products.
New York Life chairman Harry G. Hohn said at the time that the company chose to settle to move past the litigation and acknowledged that “there was a disappointment to policyholders” caused by declining investment returns, even for customers who had not been personally misled.
Pending Cost-of-Insurance Lawsuit
A new class action filed in October 2025 targets New York Life Insurance and Annuity Corporation, a subsidiary. In Toolan v. New York Life Insurance and Annuity Corp., plaintiff Timothy Toolan alleges the company failed to pass along savings from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which cut the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, says the tax reduction saved the insurer “hundreds of millions of dollars per year,” but those savings were never reflected in the cost-of-insurance charges assessed against universal life policyholders. Toolan is seeking class certification to represent all affected universal life policyholders. As of early 2026, the case remains pending.
Multistate Attorney General Settlement Over Death Benefits
In 2013, New York Life paid $15 million to settle claims brought by multiple state attorneys general. The investigation, led by California and joined by Florida, Illinois, New Hampshire, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania, found that the company had been using the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File to identify deceased annuity holders and stop making payments to them, while failing to use the same database to identify deceased life insurance policyholders and pay their beneficiaries. The company used death records to save money but not to honor its obligations. As part of the settlement, New York Life agreed to regularly cross-reference all in-force life insurance policies and annuities against the Death Master File to promptly identify deaths and locate beneficiaries.
New York DFS Consent Order on Annuity Replacements
The New York State Department of Financial Services announced a consent order against New York Life Insurance and Annuity Corporation on March 2, 2021, imposing $10.929 million in combined penalties and restitution. DFS found that the subsidiary had failed to properly disclose income comparisons and suitability information when customers exchanged deferred annuities for immediate annuities. In many cases, policyholders ended up with less income from substantially similar payout options. The company paid $5.4 million in restitution to affected New York consumers, who received higher monthly payouts for the remainder of their contract terms. The remaining $5.529 million was a civil penalty. New York Life was required to revise its disclosure statements to include side-by-side monthly income comparisons and to overhaul its suitability review and training procedures.
SEC Action Against New York Life Investment Management
In May 2009, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought an administrative proceeding against New York Life Investment Management LLC, the company’s investment advisory subsidiary. The SEC found that NYLIM had misled the board of trustees of the MainStay Equity Index Fund about the cost and value of a “Guarantee” feature provided by an affiliate. Between 2002 and 2004, the subsidiary filed prospectuses and annual reports claiming there was “no charge” to the fund or its shareholders for the Guarantee while simultaneously telling the board that the Guarantee justified higher management fees.
NYLIM consented to the order without admitting or denying the findings. The SEC imposed a censure, a cease-and-desist order, and $6.1 million in disgorgement, prejudgment interest, and civil penalties. Those funds were established as a Fair Fund and distributed to affected shareholders invested in the fund between March 2002 and June 2004. After approximately $3.52 million was distributed to eligible investors, the remaining $2.58 million was transferred to the U.S. Treasury.
Employment, Agent, and Discrimination Lawsuits
New York Life has also faced litigation from its own agents and employees over pay practices and discrimination.
In Gold v. New York Life Insurance Co., a former insurance agent filed a putative class action in 2009 alleging unpaid overtime wages and improper “ledger-based” wage deductions under New York Labor Law. The agent challenged his classification as an “outside salesman,” arguing that his work providing investment recommendations entitled him to overtime. The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted summary judgment to the company on the overtime claim, finding the agent’s primary duty was selling insurance and his pay was tied exclusively to sales. The Second Circuit affirmed in September 2013. The entire case was ultimately dismissed for lack of jurisdiction under the Class Action Fairness Act’s “home state exception.”
In 2020, Aliea Hughes-Phillips filed a proposed class action in the Southern District of New York alleging that New York Life’s criminal background check process for job applicants violated New York state and city laws by requesting and using information about crimes for which applicants were never convicted, amounting to race discrimination. By March 2021, the parties reached an agreement in principle to settle, but the case was terminated via an order of discontinuance without the settlement terms being made part of the public record. Neither the settlement amount nor the final class size was disclosed.
A separate race discrimination case, Bossé v. New York Life Insurance Company, was filed in 2019 by Ketler Bossé, a former agent who alleged he was the first Black agent hired by the company in New Hampshire and that his business relationship was terminated in 2016 for pretextual reasons. The First Circuit ruled in March 2021 that an arbitration delegation clause in his employment agreement was enforceable and ordered the district court to compel arbitration.
Other Regulatory Fines and Penalties
Beyond the headline cases, New York Life and its subsidiaries have accumulated a steady stream of smaller regulatory fines. FINRA fined NYLIFE Securities $354,000 in 2007 and $350,000 in 2004 for investor protection violations. The Indiana Securities Division imposed a $275,000 penalty in 2017, and the Maine Bureau of Securities fined the securities arm $50,000 in 2019. State insurance regulators have also acted: Minnesota’s Department of Commerce fined the company $800,000 in 2016, California’s Department of Insurance imposed $175,000 in 2009, Louisiana assessed $100,000 in 2023, and Washington State fined New York Life $46,000 in 2024 for a training lapse. Smaller fines from Florida, Virginia, Missouri, Montana, and Delaware round out the list.