Employee Ownership Blog
Corey Rosen

Corey Rosen

Once Again, the SBA's ESOP Loan Program Becomes Dysfunctional

The first piece of legislation I wrote on ESOPs as a Congressional staffer was the Small Business Employee Ownership Act. It became law in 1980. The bill was designed to address the SBA's refusal to make loans to ESOP trusts. At the time, loans often went directly to the ESOP trust rather than first to the company, which would then reloan it to the ESOP. The new law clarified that the SBA could make a loan directly to the ESOP trust. Shortly after that, I started the NCEO. After a couple of years, the SBA still had not issued guidance on how the law would be implemented. I set up a meeting with SBA officials to discuss the issue. They told me the law did not mean what I thought. I explained that I actually wrote the law, but they were not persuaded. The law also directed them to run an outreach program, but they didn't want to do that either. 

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Corey Rosen

Employee Ownership Companies Make Time Magazine’s Best Private Companies List

Employee ownership figures prominently in Time magazine’s brand-new list of America's Best Private Companies of 2026. Fourteen of the top 100 companies are employee-owned; 13 are partially or entirely ESOP-owned, and 1 company is partly owned through an employee ownership trust. The list includes 500 companies; we looked at the top 100. Time partnered with Statista to “evaluate and rank the most prominent firms in the country based on employee satisfaction, financial performance, and sustainability transparency. Both public companies and private companies that report their financial and sustainability data were considered.” Details on the methodology can be found here.

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Corey Rosen

Cassidy and Sanders Add Amendment to Fund DOL Employee Ownership Initiative

Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) added an amendment (PDF) to S. 3333, the Emergency Savings Enhancement Act of 2025, that would dramatically increase funding for the Employee Ownership Initiative in the US Department of Labor (DOL). The initiative is part of the WORK Act, which was incorporated into the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. The WORK Act established the Employee Ownership Initiative in the DOL to serve as a clearinghouse for information on employee ownership and, more importantly, provide funding for state employee ownership outreach and education programs. While the WORK Act authorized funds for the program, they were never appropriated. In 2025, the DOL administratively set aside $2 million for the program. 

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Corey Rosen

DOL Schedules Valuation Regulations for November 2026

The US Department of Labor (DOL) released its 2026 rule list, which states that it will issue ESOP valuation regulations in November 2026. The regulations are required by the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. The DOL issued proposed regulations in December 2025, but they were rescinded along with all other pending regulations when the new administration took office the next month. 

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Corey Rosen

New NCEO Task Force Examines Effect of Repurchase Obligations on Value

A new NCEO task force of trustees is examining how an ESOP company’s repurchase obligation should affect its stock value. The repurchase obligation can be a significant financial cost for ESOP companies, but this liability is currently not reflected on the balance sheet or income statement. Historically, valuation firms ignored the potential impact of repurchase obligations, arguing that the company could always simply be sold and the obligation would go away. The effect of this in some companies was that they were forced to sell to meet their repurchase obligations, whereas they would not have had to if the share price had been adjusted all along for the ongoing liability. In a few extreme cases, companies that had rapid cyclical growth followed by cyclical decline have found that their repurchase obligations to employees who left at a high point forced them into bankruptcy.

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Corey Rosen

NJ Legislature Passes Major Employee Ownership Bill

New Jersey bill A5016/S4218, which would establish a program in the state Economic Development Administration to “encourage employee ownership awareness and provide funding and advisory support,” has now passed both chambers of the state legislature. The bill makes permanent a program created under former Governor Phil Murphy in 2024 to provide technical assistance and outreach and to help defray the costs of feasibility studies for companies considering employee ownership transitions. The current governor, Mikie Sherrill, is expected to sign the bill.

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Corey Rosen

RI Senate Unanimously Passes Bill to Create State Employee Ownership Center

The Rhode Island Senate unanimously passed S. 2922, which would create the Rhode Island Center for Employee Ownership (RICEO). According to the bill text, “the purpose of the RICEO will be to secure resources, provide technical assistance, and serve generally as a concierge service both to legacy business owners and worker owners interested in transitioning a small business to an appropriate employee-owned business model.” Worker cooperatives, ESOPs, and companies where a majority of the stock is owned by an employee ownership trust are all explicitly mentioned as examples of employee ownership, but the RICEO could provide assistance for other models. 

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