The court agreed with the employees that the previous actuarial assumptions used to calculate lump-sum distributions were part of accrued benefits and, as such, were protected by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act's anti-cutback rule. Named plaintiff Linda Call terminated her employment with Ameritech in November 1999 and received a lump-sum pension distribution of $219,312. The distribution was calculated by using the plan's "Eleventh Amendment," which Ameritech enacted in response to the Retirement Protection Act of 1994 (RPA). The RPA authorizes the use of the interest rate on 30-year U.S. Treasury securities rather than Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation interest rates and the 1983 Group Annuity Mortality (GAM) tables for calculation of lump-sum distributions if a plan sponsor has embraced GATT.

Under Ameritech's "Eleventh Amendment," lump-sum distributions paid after July 1, 1999, would be valued as the greater of the distribution produced by use of: (1) the PBGC interest rates for valuing lump-sums and the UP-1984 (uninsured pensioner) mortality table, or (2) the interest rate on 30-year treasury bonds and the 1983 GAM table. However, according to the court, when Ameritech adopted the Eleventh Amendment, it did not amend a section of the plan that provided that "no amendment will reduce a participant's accrued benefit to less than the accrued benefit that he would have been entitled to receive if he had resigned from [Ameritech] on the day of the amendment ... , and no amendment will eliminate an optional form of benefit with respect to a participant or beneficiary except as otherwise permitted by law and applicable regulations."

Call alleged that if Ameritech had used the 1983 GAM table and the applicable PBGC rates when it calculated her lump-sum distributions, rather than the 30-year U.S. Treasury security rate called for under the "Eleventh Amendment," she would have received $255,088.