Employee Ownership Blog

Francesco Bova, an assistant professor of accounting at the University of Toronto and a Kelso Fellow for research in employee ownership, drew on lists provided by the NCEO to track the disclosure practices of 279 public companies with varying degrees of employee ownership.

Long-time ESOP company Reflexite, of Avon, Connecticut, announced yesterday that it had signed an agreement to merge with the German company ORAFOL Europe GmbH.

Smart Business featured an article on USA800, a company that primarily serves incoming calls to 800 numbers.

Robert Oakeshott, the founder of the UK's Employee Ownership Association, died on June 21. His obituary appeared in the July 7 issue of the Economist (available online at this link).

Eleven of the 50 winners of the Inc. 2011 Winning Workplaces awards either have ESOPs, provide broad-based stock options, or are worker cooperatives. Eight of the winners are NCEO members.

To read the headlines on the Supreme Court decision CIGNA v. Amara, No. 09-804 (U.S. May 16, 2011), it might seem that employers won a big victory.

On June 24, the IRS issued what it termed a clarification of the rules regarding performance-based equity compensation.

When people work in an employee ownership company with a strong culture, is there a tendency for their values to converge? Anecdotally, the answer would appear to be "yes," given the intense nature of the work environment and the shared goals toward which people work.

The founder and long-time executive director of the UK's Employee Ownership Association (EOA), Robert Oakeshott, died on June 18. Mr.

A lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Labor against the DirecTECH Holding Co. Inc. Employee Stock Ownership Plan resulted in six consent judgments requiring payment of $10,454,545 in restitution to plan participants and $1,045,454 in civil penalties to the federal government.

San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee signed legislation that would give certain companies a partial tax exclusion on stock options.

Three New England Republican senators (Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Scott Brown of Massachusetts) introduced a bill that would prevent the Department of Labor from implementing regulations that would make ESOP appraisers fiduciaries of those plans.