Corporations will soon be required to report to the government whether

Hi All,

Corporations will soon be required to report to the government whether they have the necessary reserves to pay the pension benefits earned by their employees and that the information be published in annual reports to shareholders.



As usual we will begin by understanding the meaning of this sentence. The sentence is saying that corporations will soon be asked to report to report to the government whether they have the necessary funds to pay the pension benefits earned by their employees. In addition, they will be required to publish this information in annual reports to shareholders.



Now let’s find the errors by splitting the sentence into clauses:

Cl 1: Corporations will soon be required to report to the government
Cl 2: whether they have the necessary reserves to pay the pension benefits earned by their employees
Cl 3: and that the information be published in annual reports to shareholders.

Error Analysis:

1. Presence of “and” indicates the presence of a list. Hence, it is very important to identify correct entities in the list. So the list in the sentence is:
Corporations will soon be required to X and Y.
X = report to the government whether they have the necessary reserves to pay the pension benefits earned by their employees
Y = that the information be published in annual reports to shareholders.

These two entities are not parallel because the first entity is written in “to verb” form while the second one is written in subjunctive verb form.

POE:

A. earned by their employees and that the information be published: Incorrect for the reason stated above.

B. that their employees earned and that the information be published: Incorrect. Repeats the same parallelism error as in choice A.

C. that was earned by their employees with the information being published: Incorrect.

1. Singular “was” does not agree in number with plural “pension benefits”.
2. This sentence distorts the meaning of the sentence. This choice now says that employees earned the benefits with information that was being published in the annual reports. This is clearly not the intended meaning.

D. earned by their employees, information that must also be published: Correct. This choice discards the parallelism in the sentence to convey the intended meaning most effectively. Here “information that must also be published…” is a Noun (information) + Noun Modifier “that must be…”) that modifies the preceding clause “whether they have…”.

E. earned by their employees and published the information: Incorrect. Past tense “published” is cannot follow “to” and to logically make “to require” and “to publish” parallel.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.
Shraddha