MetLife Inc. will pay nearly $500 million in a settlement involving more than 30 states that claimed it didn’t provide life insurance benefits to some of its policyholders, the company said Monday. The largest life insurer in the United States said it expects to pay about $188 million of the $478 million this year, and the remainder over the next 17 years.
The New York-based life insurer, which has major operations in Bloomfield, Conn., settled as part of a much wider investigation by several states into life insurance practices. State regulators investigated MetLife’s use of the Social Security Administration’s "Death Master" file, a database of people who have died.
