634
Opinion of the Court
The second major difference attending the two presumptions lies in the sense of reasonableness that must be dis-proven by an employer attacking the actuary's methods and assumptions, as against the reasonableness of the trustees' determinations of historical fact. Following the usual presumption of statutory interpretation, that the same term carries the same meaning whenever it appears in the same Act, see Atlantic Cleaners & Dyers, Inc. v. United States, 286 U. S. 427, 433 (1932), we might expect "reasonable" in § 1401(a)(3)(B) to function here just as it did in § 1401(a) (3)(A), to denote a certain range of probability that a factual determination is correct. For several reasons, however, we think it clear that this second presumption of reasonableness functions quite differently.
First, of course, the statute does not speak in terms of disproving the reasonableness of the calculation of the employer's share of the unfunded liability, which would be the finding of future fact most obviously analogous to the findings of historical fact to which the § 1401(a)(3)(A) presumption applies. Section 1401(a)(3)(B) speaks instead of the aggregate reasonableness of the assumptions and methods employed by the actuary in calculating the dollar liability figure. Because a "method" is not "accurate" or probably "true" within some range, "reasonable" must be understood here to refer to some different kind of judgment, one that it would make sense to apply to a review of methodology as
disliked, see Huber v. Casablanca Industries, Inc., 916 F. 2d 85, 93 (CA3 1990), we know of none in which a plan sponsor was found to have replaced an actuary's actuarial methods or assumptions with different ones of its own. Although we express no view on the question whether a plan sponsor must adopt the assumptions used by the actuary, we note that the legislative history of § 1082, which was enacted as part of ERISA in 1974, suggests that the actuarial assumptions must be "independently determined by an actuary," and that it is "inappropriate for an employer to substitute his judgment . . . for that of a qualified actuary" with respect to these assumptions. S. Rep. No. 93-383, p. 70 (1973); see also H. R. Rep. No. 93-807, p. 95 (1974).
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