The Eleventh Circuit denied on Wednesday software company NCR Corp.'s request to rehear a case in which the court ruled that the company cannot issue lump-sum payments to deferred compensation plan participants as alternatives to promised life annuities.

The appeals court denied the Georgia-based firm's request for both a panel rehearing and an en banc rehearing, instead leaving in place an August decision that affirmed a win for Jon Hoak and nearly 200 other former executives who hit the company with a class action alleging they'd been bilked out of promised benefits.

The three-judge panel upheld a Georgia federal court's 2024 order finding the plan administrator for NCR Voyix, formerly known as NCR Corp., violated the terms of its "top hat" retirement plans when it terminated the plans in 2013 and paid out participants through actuarially calculated lump sums that were discounted at 5%.

In its petition for rehearing, NCR said the panel departed from the circuit's own established law in upholding a win for the executives based on a retrospective finding that the payments "adversely affected" the beneficiaries, contrary to the plan's rules. NCR argued that the decision by its plan administrator to pay out the lump sums should have instead been evaluated on the administrator's forecasting at the time of the payments.

"Such an analysis," the company said, meaning a retrospective view, "would have been impossible for the administrator to undertake prospectively at the time of termination — because the administrator cannot predict how long each participant would actually live."

"Because of that impossibility, the administrator provided each participant equivalent value calculated according to industry-standard methods rather than, as the panel would have it, paying out a windfall for a far higher-value benefit," NCR added.

First filed in 2015, the executives' suit said they had been participants in a decadeslong deferred compensation plan afforded to senior officials. In the early 2010s, they alleged, NCR terminated the plan as it faced ballooning debt obligations.

But rather than pay out the plan as annuities, as the executives said was required, NCR distributed lump sums based on an actuarial equivalent calculation — a means of equalizing lifetime payments based on life expectancies. NCR also deducted the company's debt obligations from the disbursements, knocking another 5% off the sum.

Hoak and other employees said this arrangement clearly violated the plan's prohibition on adversely affecting its beneficiaries through its termination.

U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg agreed in February 2024 and granted summary judgment in the executives' favor, which was later upheld by the Eleventh Circuit.

Attorneys for the parties did not respond to requests for comment Thursday.

The executives are represented by Michael E. Klenov and Garrett R. Broshuis of Korein Tillery LLC and by David G.H. Brackett and Kayla B. Polonsky of Bondurant Mixson & Elmore LLP.

The plan administrator for NCR is represented by Paul W. Hughes, Sarah P. Hogarth and Charles Seidell of McDermott Will & Schulte LLP.

The case is Jon Hoak et al. v. NCR Corp. et al., case number 24-12148, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.