Distraught widow slams JP Morgan for refusing to give her late banker husband’s pension

A devastated widow is battling JPMorgan Chase to access her late husband’s pension over a paperwork error.

Melvyn Silverberg worked for ten years as a systems analyst at Chase Manhattan Bank until 1979. He died suddenly in 1988 from multiple organ failure, when he was only 43 years old.

Chase Manhattan merged with JPMorgan in 2000 to become America’s largest bank, with profits of more than $12 billion in the third quarter of 2024.

His widow, Elaine Silverberg, 73, said she has been battling the banking giant for more than a decade to access his $53,000 pension pot.

‘You would think that the bank would want to do the right thing. They treated me like an insignificant cockroach that just needed to be stepped on,” Elaine said The New York Post.

“As Jamie Dimon [the JPMorgan Chase CEO] If he were aware of this, he would want to do the right thing and honor the pension.”

Social Security Administration documents viewed by The Post estimate Melvyn’s bill would be worth $331 a month.

Elaine was 37 years old when Melvyn died and became a single mother to their three children.

She has been trying to access his pension after her retirement as clerk for the New York State Assembly in Albany in 2011.

JPMorgan Chase refused to give her the money because Melvyn had not filled out the paperwork to choose her as his beneficiary.

“While we sympathize with Ms. Silverberg, she is asking us to pay without the necessary documentation,” a JPMorgan spokesperson said. ‘We follow the terms of our pension plan, which do not allow individual exceptions.’

The Retirement Equity Act of 1984 made spouses the default beneficiary for married employees, but did not go into effect until after Melvyn’s death.

Elaine said if JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon (pictured) were aware of the problem, she believes he would want to do the right thing

The banking giant argued that Elaine’s late husband had not filed the paperwork naming her as a beneficiary

‘This is a lot of money for me. To them it’s just a joke,” said Elaine. “I feel like Mel is ashamed of what they’re doing to me.”

“I’m not destitute, but this was never about poverty, just about justice.”

Documents seen by The Post show that the company tried to contact Melvyn three times about choosing partner coverage — including once in 1990, two years after his death.

Christopher Dagg, a senior staff attorney at the Mid-Atlantic Pension Counseling Project, told the news station that the bank’s argument was “weak.”

‘We regularly see this recurring problem, where a pension plan cannot prove that it sent an important document to a participant, but claims that a procedure has been put in place to try to shift the burden of proof to the participant, who must then attempt to negative year to be proven. later,” he said.