Cite as: 516 U. S. 489 (1996)
Thomas, J., dissenting
Because an employer's representations about the company's financial prospects or about the possible impact of ordinary business transactions on the security of unvested welfare benefits do not involve execution or implementation of duties imposed by the plan or the Act, and because these are the types of representations employers regularly make in the ordinary course of running a business, I would not hold that such communications involve plan administration. The untruthfulness of a statement cannot magically transform it from a nonfiduciary representation into a fiduciary one; the determinative factor is not truthfulness but the capacity in which the statement is made.
B
With only passing reference to the relevant statutory text, the majority discards the limits that Congress imposed on fiduciary status and replaces them with a far broader standard plucked from the common law of trusts. See ante, at 502. Relying on trust treatises and our decision in Central States, Southeast & Southwest Areas Pension Fund v. Central Transport, Inc., 472 U. S. 559 (1985), the majority concludes that a person engages in plan administration whenever he exercises " 'powers as are necessary or appropriate for the carrying out of the purposes' of the trust." Ante, at
is the administration of claims pursuant to the plan's claims procedure, which is described in § 11 of the plan. See generally id., at 18-20 (section of plan entitled "Allocation of Responsibilities Among Named Fiduciaries," which enumerates all of the fiduciary obligations imposed by the plan).
Though I do not claim that plan administration is necessarily limited to performance of duties imposed by the plan documents, see ante, at 504, the majority's response to this straw man argument—that ERISA's fiduciary obligations would be meaningless if only the performance of duties imposed by the plan qualified as plan administration—is nonetheless flawed. The majority's argument is based on the mistaken assumption that a plan cannot assign discretionary authority to plan administrators (the exercise of which would clearly be subject to fiduciary duties under the Act), an assumption flatly contradicted both by the common law of trusts and by common sense. See Bogert & Bogert, supra n. 6, § 552.
533
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