Skip to content

Employee Ownership Blog

Timothy Garbinsky

Browse the NCEO's 2023 Holiday Gift Guide

It’s that time of year again! This December, you can support employee-owned businesses while crossing items off your wish list by shopping with our NCEO Gift Guide. Every year, we refresh this guide to bring you the latest in consumer goods and products created and/or sold by employee-owned businesses.


Corey Rosen

Canadian Government Proposes Significant Tax Incentives for Employee Ownership Trusts

In its 2023 Fall Economic Statement released on November 21, the Canadian government (the ruling party in Parliament)  “introduce[d] a series of new measures to advance the government's economic plan by continuing to build a stronger economy, and provide[d] important updates on key pillars of the government's plan to fight climate change and create great careers for Canadians from coast to coast to coast.” The new measures include a tax exclusion on up to the first $10 million in capital gains from the sale of a business to a qualifying employee ownership trust (EOT) (p. 62 of the PDF version of the Fall Economic Statement). A similar law in the UK has spurred rapid development of EOTs, which are growing at a rate three times that of ESOPs in the U.S., even though the UK is much smaller.


Timothy Garbinsky

Putting the Equity in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Around this time in late 2021, I wrote about the urgent need for DEI programs to address the myriad issues of racial and gender equity in the working world. At that point, the call to act felt clear not only to me but also to those who’d been previously deaf to it—significant portions of the population belonged to demographic groups long passed over, ignored, cast aside, or waved away. It felt (and excuse the clunky, on-the-nose metaphor) as though the issues of modern work were being seen no longer in drab and dichotomous black and white, but in technicolor, with all the vibrancy and nuance that that implies.




Scott Rodrick

IRS Further Clarifies Current Focus on ESOPs

We reported on August 9 that an IRS press release issued that day stated that as part of “an expanded focus on ensuring high-income taxpayers pay what they owe,” it was warning “businesses and tax professionals to be alert to a range of compliance issues that can be associated with" ESOPs. On September 19, we reported that in discussions with Employee-Owned S Corporations of America (ESCA), the IRS clarified that the press release was not an official notice and that the focus was only on a small subgroup of practitioners and a specific ESOP structure used for tax avoidance.


Loren Rodgers

New Research on the Impact of UK Employee Ownership

New research released on October 19, 2023 on employee ownership in the United Kingdom – the People Powered Growth Report – suggests the UK’s employee ownership sector is outperforming the UK’s national productivity while contributing to several measures of employee and community wellbeing. The report also notes that the number of employee-owned businesses in the UK increased by 30% over the last year. 


Lindsay Isaac

New Resources for Employee Ownership Month

Employee Ownership Month provides us with an opportunity to celebrate, reward, and educate employee-owners and the companies they work for. Stepping back, it’s helpful to understand the history behind the celebration and why it matters today. That’s where this month’s Download (solutions-focused, member-exclusive content delivered to your inbox monthly) comes in. The October resource is a two-page handout* that provides the background and context for Employee Ownership Month (available in Spanish on the aforementioned Download landing page)*. 


Loren Rodgers

ESOP CEOs Discuss Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence will change how businesses operate, but is its impact any different in an employee-owned company? The CEOs of the ESOP companies that participate in the NCEO’s CEO network discussed opportunities and threats, and this blog post extracts a few highlights from their confidential conversations.