How to Use Union and Pension Records to Find a Retiree
A retired tradesman, nurse, longshoreman or stagehand sits inside more compelled federal disclosure than almost any other adult in America. Their union files a signed financial report with the Department of Labor every year, and Congress made those filings public to anyone who asks. Their benefit fund files a Form 5500 that the government is required to publish. And if that fund ever winds up, federal law obliges it to go looking for the very person you are trying to reach. Yet none of that machinery is pointed at you, and one part of it is written specifically to keep a name and address out of your hands. This guide walks the two disclosure regimes that govern union and pension paper, shows precisely what each one yields, marks where each one stops, and explains the lawful route to actually reaching a retiree once you know which institution holds the relationship.
Where This Search Actually Begins
Not with the retiree. With the custodian. Union and pension records are public in a narrow, specific way: they tell you which organizations still exist, who runs them, where they sit, and how they are funded. They do not contain a member list, and the one federal provision that forces a multiemployer fund to hand over documents on request also forbids it from including anything individually identifiable about a participant. So the productive sequence runs institution-first. Identify the correct local and the correct benefit fund from filings anyone may read, confirm the fund is still operating and has not merged into a successor, and then approach through the channel that already holds a live relationship with the retiree, which in almost every case means asking the fund to forward a message rather than asking it for an address. People Locator Skip Tracing does the identification and the independent public-records locate that runs alongside it. .
Watch: Where Pension Paper Lives
The filings that are public, the ones that are not, and the difference it makes.
Watch Overview
Two Disclosure Laws, Neither of Them Yours
One opens to any person and holds no names. One holds names and opens to almost nobody.
Before anything else, a disambiguation that costs people weeks. Search the phrase “union pension records” and a large share of what comes back concerns the Union Army of the American Civil War and the federal invalid and widow pensions paid to its veterans from the 1860s onward. Genealogy publishers have owned that phrase for a generation. Those files are magnificent for tracing a nineteenth-century ancestor and completely irrelevant to a living retiree from a labor union. If your searches keep surfacing regimental numbers and widow’s declarations, you are in the wrong archive, and adding the word “labor” or the specific trade to your query will usually pull you back out.
The living-retiree problem is governed by two entirely separate federal statutes that people routinely blur together. They were passed fifteen years apart, they regulate different entities, and they point in opposite directions on the question you actually care about.
The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act: open door, no names
Enacted in September 1959, the LMRDA requires every labor organization to file an annual signed financial report with the Secretary of Labor. The statute spells out what has to be in it: assets and liabilities at both ends of the fiscal year, receipts and their sources, salaries and disbursements to each officer and to every employee paid more than $10,000 in the aggregate, loans to officers or members above $250, loans to business enterprises, and other disbursements with their purposes. That list is set out at 29 U.S.C. § 431.
Then comes the provision that makes this useful. A separate section states flatly that the contents of those reports “shall be public information,” and directs the Secretary to make reasonable provision for their inspection and examination on the request of any person. Not any member. Any person. That language lives at 29 U.S.C. § 435, and it is the single most permissive disclosure rule anywhere near this subject.
ERISA: names inside, and a bar on releasing them
The Employee Retirement Income Security Act governs the benefit fund rather than the union. It creates real, enforceable disclosure duties, and it aims every one of them at participants, beneficiaries and the government. Where the LMRDA says “any person,” ERISA enumerates a short list of who may ask, and then, in the multiemployer provision, expressly instructs the plan to strip out anything that would identify an individual. The two statutes are not merely different in degree. On the question of whether a stranger can obtain a retiree’s whereabouts from the system, they agree: no.
Understanding that split is what turns this from a frustrating dead end into a workable method, because it tells you exactly which questions each body of records can answer and stops you wasting effort asking the wrong custodian.
What a Union Local Must File Every Year
The filings are free, searchable, and more revealing about institutions than most people expect.
The Office of Labor-Management Standards runs the collection, and it publishes what it collects through the OLMS Online Public Disclosure Room. The reports are filed on a tiered set of forms scaled to the size of the organization. Under the reporting regulation at 29 C.F.R. § 403.4, a labor organization not in trusteeship with gross annual receipts under $250,000 may elect to file the shorter Form LM-3, and one with gross annual receipts under $10,000 may elect the shorter still Form LM-4. Everything above that threshold files the detailed LM-2. In practice this means the large fund-adjacent locals and the internationals produce the richest filings, and a very small local may produce a single-page return.
What the filings actually give a searcher
Read institutionally rather than personally, an LM report is a strong instrument:
- Whether the local still exists. The disclosure room orders organizations by the date of their latest annual report received, and terminated labor organizations appear at the end of the list. A local that stopped filing years ago is a local that merged, was absorbed, or folded, and that single fact redirects an entire search.
- Its file number, affiliation and mailing address. This is how you get from “he was in the pipefitters somewhere around Toledo” to a specific designation number and a street address you can actually write to.
- Its officers, by name and title. Officer compensation is itemized, so the president, treasurer and business manager are all named. These are the people who can decide whether to pass a message along.
- Its financial shape. Receipts, disbursements, assets and liabilities, and on the LM-2, separate assets, liabilities, receipts, disbursements, accounts-receivable and accounts-payable schedules.
- Membership figures. The disclosure room exposes a membership report on LM-2 filings, but read it for what it is: counts by category, not a roster. No LM form has ever contained a list of member names, and none ever will.
Two limits worth knowing before you start
The first is jurisdictional, and it is stated by OLMS in its own words on the disclosure room: OLMS does not have jurisdiction over unions representing solely state, county or municipal employees, and those unions do not file financial reports with OLMS. So if your retiree was a city firefighter, a county road-crew member, a municipal transit operator or a state-employed nurse in a public-sector-only local, there may be no federal filing at all. Some of those organizations report under a state statute instead, and some report nowhere. That is a genuine gap, not a search you ran badly.
The second is definitional. A local union and the benefit fund that pays its retirees are usually separate legal entities with separate addresses, separate trustees and separate filings. Writing to the local about a pension question frequently produces a polite redirect, and writing to the fund about a membership question produces the same in reverse. Working out which of the two you actually need is half the job, and it is why the next section matters as much as this one.
Form 5500 Names the Fund, Not the Member
The most useful public pension document in the country, and the most commonly misread.
Most union retirees in the private sector draw from a multiemployer plan. ERISA defines one as a plan to which more than one employer is required to contribute and which is maintained under one or more collective bargaining agreements between one or more employee organizations and more than one employer, at 29 U.S.C. § 1002(37)(A). The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, which insures them, describes the same thing more plainly in its introduction to multiemployer plans as a collectively bargained plan maintained by more than one employer, usually in the same or related industries, and a labor union, and notes that these are commonly called Taft-Hartley plans. Portability is the point of them: a member who moves between contributing employers keeps accruing in the same fund, and in some industries reciprocity lets credit follow a member between geographic areas and between plans.
That design is precisely why the fund, not the last employer, is the institution that knows your retiree. A member may have worked for a dozen contractors across forty years. Only one entity followed them the whole way.
Why the annual report is on the public internet at all
Because ERISA says it has to be. The disclosure section at 29 U.S.C. § 1024 requires that identification and basic plan information and actuarial information from the annual report be filed with the Secretary in an electronic format that accommodates display on the internet, and directs the Secretary to display it within 90 days of filing on a government website. The same section requires the administrator to make the summary plan description, the latest annual report and the governing trust or bargaining instruments available for examination by any plan participant or beneficiary, and to furnish copies on written request, with a reasonable charge permitted.
The resulting system is EFAST2, which receives and displays the Form 5500 series on behalf of the Department of Labor, the Internal Revenue Service and PBGC. Its Form 5500 Series Search is free and requires no account.
What you can lift from a 5500, and what is simply not in it
A filed 5500 will typically give you the exact legal name of the plan, its three-digit plan number and the sponsor’s employer identification number, the plan administrator and the administrator’s address, the plan year, the number of participants in defined categories including retirees and beneficiaries receiving benefits, and the service providers the plan pays. For a multiemployer defined benefit plan there is an actuarial schedule attached as well. That is an extraordinary amount of institutional detail, and it is the fastest route to a current, correct mailing address for a fund office whose letterhead you last saw twenty years ago.
What is not in it, and never has been, is any individual participant. The counts are counts. If a page or a service implies you can search a 5500 for a person’s name, what it means is that you can search for a plan by employer or plan name. Keep that distinction sharp and the record becomes genuinely useful rather than disappointing.
The multiemployer disclosure duty, and the sentence that ends the shortcut
There is a specific provision requiring a multiemployer defined benefit plan administrator, on written request, to furnish a substantial package of documents: the current plan document, the latest summary plan description, the trust agreement, the annual report, funding notices, periodic actuarial reports, financial reports prepared by plan investment managers, audited financial statements and, for a plan in critical or endangered status, the funding improvement or rehabilitation plan. The response is due within 30 days. It sits at 29 U.S.C. § 1021(k).
Two features of it matter enormously here. First, the right belongs to a defined and short list of requesters: a plan participant or beneficiary, an employee representative, or an employer with an obligation to contribute to the plan. A researcher, an attorney without a client in one of those categories, a sibling or an old friend is not on that list. Second, and decisively, the statute directs that the information provided shall not include any individually identifiable information regarding any plan participant, beneficiary, employee, fiduciary or contributing employer. Even the participant who is entitled to invoke it cannot use it to obtain another person’s details. Congress built the door and then wrote into the same paragraph that nobody may carry a name through it.
If you have been assuming there is a form or a request letter that pries an address out of a pension fund, this is the sentence that tells you there is not. That is not an obstacle to route around. It is the answer, and any method that appears to defeat it is a method built on deception.
The One Moment a Plan Must Come Looking
Federal law obliges a search for a missing participant. It obliges it exactly once.
There is a federal statutory duty to hunt for a lost pension participant, and it is real. The surprise is not that the duty is missing. It is how narrowly it is drawn: one event triggers it, and nothing else does.
The missing-participants provision, at 29 U.S.C. § 1350, defines a “missing participant” as a participant or beneficiary under a terminating plan whom the plan administrator cannot locate after a diligent search. Every obligation in that section keys off a plan that is ending. Subsection (c) extends the framework to multiemployer plans that terminate, and subsection (d) lets certain plans outside the main coverage rules elect into it on termination.
Read the converse and the practical consequence lands: an ongoing, healthy multiemployer fund that mails benefit checks every month has no obligation under this section at all. It has fiduciary duties, it wants to reach its people, and as a matter of ordinary administration it will usually try. But the specific statutory command to go and look attaches at wind-up. If the fund your retiree belongs to is operating normally, you are not going to be able to invoke a duty to search, because none has been triggered. If the fund did terminate, the picture changes completely and there may be money sitting somewhere with the retiree’s name attached to it. This page is written for the person outside the plan looking in. If you are standing on the other side of that wind-up — a sponsor, an administrator or plan counsel who has to document a diligent search before the plan can close — the duty looks entirely different from in there, and our guide to what a plan must do to find a missing participant works it from the administrator’s chair rather than the requester’s.
Where a terminating plan sends the benefit
PBGC runs the Missing Participants Program for exactly this. Its scope has moved, and describing the old version is a common error. Until 2018 it covered only PBGC-insured single-employer plans as part of the standard termination process. In 2018 it was expanded to also cover defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s and certain other defined benefit plans ending on or after 1 January 2018. PBGC now lists four categories of covered plan, each with its own rules and filing form, and here they are, enumerated:
- PBGC-insured single-employer plans — Form MP-100.
- Defined contribution plans — Form MP-200.
- Small professional services defined benefit plans, which are not PBGC-insured — Form MP-300.
- PBGC-insured multiemployer plans — Form MP-400.
That fourth category is the one that matters for a union retiree, and it is a comparatively recent addition. A terminating plan has two ways to use the program: transfer the money to cover the benefit to PBGC, which then pays the participant once found, or send PBGC information identifying the entity responsible for the benefit, which PBGC passes to the participant once found. For plans PBGC does not insure, participation is voluntary, and PBGC encourages it. The program is governed by section 4050 of ERISA, and the current regulation applies to plans terminating after 2017 while the prior regulation still governs PBGC-insured single-employer plans that terminated before 2018.
None of this is machinery a third party operates. It is machinery that can already be holding the answer, which is a much more encouraging position than it first appears.
Where the Federal Search Tools Run Out
Two free national databases exist. Both are built for the retiree, not for you.
Almost every consumer article on lost pensions ends at the same two links, and it is worth being precise about what happens when a third party clicks them.
The PBGC unclaimed-benefits database
PBGC holds benefits that went unpaid when a retirement plan ended, and publishes a searchable database of unclaimed retirement benefits to reunite people with them. The search is updated quarterly. Note what it asks for: a last name and the last four digits of a Social Security number, with a Privacy Act statement explaining that supplying them is how you consent to PBGC checking for an initial match on your own records. That design is deliberate and it is the reason this tool cannot serve a stranger. If you do not hold the retiree’s Social Security number, you cannot run it for them, and you should not obtain those digits by asking someone under a false pretense.
The Retirement Savings Lost and Found
The Employee Benefits Security Administration operates the Retirement Savings Lost and Found Database, established through the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, as a central place for workers and beneficiaries to find plans that may still owe them benefits and learn how to claim them. It is a genuinely valuable addition and it is also, by design, addressed to the person whose money it is.
The honest summary is that the federal government has built good tools for a retiree searching for their own benefit and has deliberately built nothing for a stranger searching for a retiree. If you are the retiree, or you are helping a parent or spouse who is present and consenting, start at both of the above and you may finish there. Our guide to tracking down a missing 401(k) or pension covers that path in detail. If you are trying to reach someone else, the union and pension record layer identifies the institution and independent public-records research does the locating, and neither one involves persuading a fund office that you are somebody you are not.
Which Filing Answers Which Question
Match the record to the question and the work gets dramatically shorter.
| Record | Who may obtain it | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| LM-2 / LM-3 / LM-4 annual report | Any person, by statute | Does this local still exist, where is it, who are its officers, how big is it |
| Union constitution and bylaws on file | Any person, by statute | How the organization is structured and how it relates to its international |
| Form 5500 and schedules | Public via the government’s own display duty | The fund’s legal name, administrator, address, participant counts and service providers |
| ERISA 101(k) document request | Participants, beneficiaries, employee representatives, contributing employers only | Plan terms and finances, with all individually identifiable information removed |
| PBGC unclaimed-benefits search | The person themselves, using their own last four SSN digits | Is PBGC holding a benefit for me from a plan that ended |
| Retirement Savings Lost and Found | The worker or beneficiary | Which plans may still owe me benefits |
| Institutional identification plus an independent locate Our Role | Requesters with a purpose the law permits | Which fund and local are the right ones, and where the person is reachable now |
Notice that the first three rows are open and impersonal, and the next three are personal and closed. There is no row in which a stranger lawfully receives an individual’s address from the benefits system, because no such row exists. The work happens by combining the open rows with lawful public-records research conducted outside this system entirely.
Where These Searches Go Wrong
Six failure patterns we see repeatedly, five of them fixable.
Searching the wrong century
The phrase pulls Civil War Union Army pension files, which are superb genealogical records and have nothing to do with a labor union. Add the trade or the word “labor” and the results reorganize.
Expecting a public-sector local to be on file
OLMS states it has no jurisdiction over unions representing solely state, county or municipal employees, and those unions file no financial report with it. For a city or county retiree, look to state-level reporting instead.
Writing to the local about a pension
The local and the benefit fund are usually separate entities with separate trustees and separate addresses. Identify both from the filings before you send anything, or you lose weeks to forwarding.
Chasing a fund that has merged
Funds consolidate, and locals are absorbed. A filing history that stops abruptly is a signal, not a dead end. The successor entity generally holds the predecessor’s records and its obligations.
Not checking whether the retiree has died
Where a member has passed, the question changes entirely and so does the right recipient. A surviving spouse or designated beneficiary may be the person the fund is already paying.
Talking your way in
This is the one that is not a technique problem. . It is dishonest, it can be unlawful, and we will not do it for any client.
The Lines We Hold on a Retiree Search
Why this particular request gets more scrutiny at intake, not less.
A retiree is an unusually reachable person on paper and an unusually vulnerable one in practice. Their income is predictable, their address tends to be stable, their institutional affiliations are documented for decades, and a great deal of elder financial exploitation begins with somebody who knew exactly which pension a person drew. We think about that before we think about method.
Permissible purpose comes first. We take on a locate when the reason for it is one the law allows and the requester can state plainly: an estate that needs a signature, a fund office trying to reach a widow, a court order that has to be served, a benefit that belongs to someone, a family reconnecting. We ask what the request is for at the start, and a vague answer ends the conversation rather than starting the work.
Someone who is hard to reach may have chosen to be. People live where they live, and a retiree who left an address behind is not automatically evading anyone. But some are. If you are looking for a person who left you, or who a court has told you to stay away from, we decline the work. We do not take a locate that reads as an attempt to reach a former partner, a family member who cut contact, or anyone protected by an order, and we do not accept a re-framed version of the same request from a relative or an intermediary a week later. If you are the one at risk here and a retiree’s pension or union affiliation is being used to track you, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233, and ask your state’s Secretary of State office about an Address Confidentiality Program, which substitutes a legal proxy address for your real one on public records. Those are real protections and they work better than hoping a record stays quiet.
We are a public-records research firm, not private investigators. . What we do is research records and locate people.
We are not a consumer reporting agency. A locate from us is not a consumer report and is not to be used for any decision covered by the Fair Credit Reporting Act, including employment, tenant screening, credit or insurance underwriting. If your question is whether to hire, rent to, or insure someone, you need a screening product from a consumer reporting agency, and we will tell you so.
We do not reach into private financial accounts. We read public and lawfully available records. We do not obtain account balances, contribution histories or benefit statements from a fund, and we would not know how to do so lawfully if you asked.
. No calls to a union hall claiming to be a member. No calls to a fund administrator claiming to be a participant, a spouse or an heir. No invented employer verifications. If a record is only obtainable by misrepresenting who is asking, then as far as we are concerned it is not obtainable.
Nothing here is legal or benefits advice. This page explains what public records exist and how to read them. Whether a particular person is owed a benefit, who is entitled to it, and how to claim it are questions for the plan administrator and for an attorney who practices in this area. We locate people and identify institutions. We do not interpret anyone’s entitlement.
How We Work a Retiree File
Institution first, person second, verification before we report anything.
Fix the trade and the era
Which craft, which employers, which years, which city. A pipefitter in Toledo in 1978 and a stagehand in Chicago in 2001 lead to entirely different filings, and the era determines whether the fund still exists under its original name.
Identify the local and the fund separately
We resolve the local through its federal reporting record and the benefit fund through its annual report filing, then confirm both are current, note any successor entity, and capture the administrator’s present address and officers.
Run the independent locate
In parallel and entirely outside the benefits system, we work lawful public-records sources to develop and verify a current address, confirm the person is living, or establish a date of death and identify next of kin where that is the answer.
Report with the route, not just the result
You get the verified locate, the identified custodians with current contact details, an honest confidence note on the match, and a recommendation on whether to approach directly or ask the fund to forward. Where we could not confirm something, we say so.
The forwarding route deserves emphasis because it is underused. A fund office that will not give you an address will quite often agree to put your sealed letter in an envelope it already addresses every month. It costs them very little, it breaches nobody’s privacy, and it puts the decision where it belongs, with the retiree. We draft that request so it is easy for an administrator to say yes to, and we say plainly who is asking and why.
Who Asks Us to Find a Retiree
Mostly people with an obligation to discharge or a family matter to settle.
Estate Administrators
Tracing a benefit owed to an estate
Union Retiree Chapters
Rebuilding a contact list
Adult Children
Settling a parent’s affairs
Plan Counsel
Working an entitlement question
Widows and Widowers
Claiming a survivor benefit
Local Union Officers
Reaching a lapsed member
The requests that arrive most often are the quietest ones. An executor turns up a pension stub in a filing cabinet and has to establish whether the fund still exists, who administers it now, and whether anything is owed to the estate. A daughter is settling her father’s affairs and needs the survivor benefit paid to her mother, who does not know the fund’s name. A retiree chapter wants to invite the surviving members of a crew to a fiftieth-anniversary dinner and is working from a 1994 phone list. If the thread you are pulling on is an old workplace rather than a benefit, our work on how to track down a former coworker comes at it from the employment side, and a surviving badge, card or ID from the job is often enough to fix the local and the era, which is the approach we take when someone brings us an old employee badge. Where the retiree has died and the question becomes who inherits, that is missing heir and beneficiary work instead.
Our Standard on Records Like These
We will tell you what the public filings actually show and what they cannot show, we will verify a match before we hand it to you, and we will say “we could not confirm this” rather than dress up a probability as a finding. . Lawful, permissible-purpose records research since 2004.
Questions People Actually Ask
Are union pension records public?
Partly, and the split matters. A union’s own annual financial report is public by statute: 29 U.S.C. section 435 says the contents of reports filed with the Secretary of Labor shall be public information and requires provision for inspection on the request of any person. A benefit fund’s Form 5500 annual report is also displayed publicly, because ERISA requires the Secretary to put the identification, basic plan and actuarial information on a government website within 90 days of filing. What is not public in either system is any individual member or participant. Neither record type contains a roster.
Can I get a retiree’s address from their union or pension fund?
No, and the law is unusually explicit about it. The multiemployer disclosure provision at 29 U.S.C. section 1021(k) gives participants, beneficiaries, employee representatives and contributing employers the right to demand a package of plan documents within 30 days, and in the same paragraph states that what is provided shall not include any individually identifiable information about any participant, beneficiary, employee, fiduciary or contributing employer. A stranger has no right to ask at all, and even an entitled requester cannot obtain a person’s details this way. What a fund will often do instead is forward a sealed letter to the address it already mails to, which is the route we recommend.
How do I find out which pension fund a retired union member belonged to?
Work from trade, geography and era rather than from the person. Identify the local that covered that craft in that city during those years through its federal reporting record, note its affiliation and file number, then search EFAST2 for the benefit fund by plan or sponsor name. Multiemployer funds are usually named for the trade and the region, so a plausible name plus a matching employer identification number is a strong confirmation. If the local stopped filing, look for the successor that absorbed it, because the successor generally holds the predecessor’s records.
What does a Form 5500 actually tell me?
It gives you the plan’s exact legal name, its plan number and the sponsor’s employer identification number, the plan administrator and that administrator’s current address, the plan year, participant counts broken into categories including retirees and beneficiaries receiving benefits, and the service providers the plan pays. For a multiemployer defined benefit plan an actuarial schedule is attached. It is the fastest way to get a correct current address for a fund office. It contains no individual participants, only counts, so no 5500 search will ever return a person’s name.
Doesn’t the pension plan have to search for a missing participant?
Only when the plan is terminating. 29 U.S.C. section 1350 defines a missing participant as someone under a terminating plan whom the administrator cannot locate after a diligent search, and every duty in the section keys off the plan ending. An ongoing fund that is paying benefits normally has no obligation under that section, so there is no duty for you to invoke. If the plan did terminate, PBGC’s Missing Participants Program may hold the benefit, and that is worth checking.
Can I search the PBGC unclaimed database for somebody else?
Not meaningfully. PBGC’s unclaimed retirement benefits search asks for a last name and the last four digits of a Social Security number, and its Privacy Act statement frames supplying them as your consent to a search of records relating to you. Without those digits you cannot run it, and obtaining someone’s Social Security number under a false pretense to run it is exactly the conduct we refuse. The Department of Labor’s Retirement Savings Lost and Found, created under the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, is likewise built for the worker or beneficiary rather than a third party.
Why do my searches keep returning Civil War records?
Because in genealogy the phrase “Union pension records” means the pensions paid to Union Army veterans of the American Civil War and to their widows, and those collections dominate the phrase online. They are excellent records for tracing a nineteenth-century ancestor and useless for a living retiree. Add the specific trade, the word “labor,” or the local’s designation number to your query and the results will reorganize around what you actually want.
What if the retiree has died?
Then the question shifts and so does the right recipient. A surviving spouse or designated beneficiary may already be receiving the benefit, in which case the fund is in contact with the family and a forwarded letter is the cleanest approach. If nobody has claimed a survivor benefit, that becomes an estate and beneficiary matter rather than a locate. We confirm a date of death from the record before drawing any of those conclusions, because acting on an unverified death is how a search goes badly wrong.
Know the Trade and the Era? That Is Enough to Start.
Tell us the craft, the city and roughly the years, and we will identify the local and the benefit fund from the public filings and run a lawful locate alongside it. Send us a permissible-purpose request and we will scope it, normally within 24 hours. Contact us and say what the request is for.
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