Employee Ownership Blog

The new NCEO survey on employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs) shows that companies with fewer employees have both more generous plan features and higher participation rates. The differences are dramatic.

In its LaRue decision (LaRue v. DeWolf, Boberg & Associates, 128 S. Ct. 1020, 42 EBC 2857 [2008]), the Supreme Court allowed individuals to sue ERISA plan fiduciaries to recover their personal losses from the plan.

Each Congress, ESOP advocates, working with the ESOP Association, introduce the ESOP Improvements Act. The bill's supporters do not expect the bill to pass per se, but it serves as a useful tool for proposing amendments to any tax legislation that comes up.

In the NCEO's new survey on employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs), we found that the better the terms of the plan, the better the return on investment plan administrators believed the company received from having a plan.

In Johnson v. Couturier, Nos.

In my last column, I noted that 11 of the 35 finalists for the annual Winning Workplaces Awards are NCEO members. Ten of these have ESOPs. We left 2 out of our list of the finalists, TEOCO (The Employee Ownership Company) and Cargas Systems.

It is far from a scientific sample, but ESOP valuation advisors are generally telling us that their clients are doing about as well as or somewhat better than non-ESOP clients in terms of their stock values.

Eleven of the 35 finalists for the annual Winning Workplaces Awards are NCEO members. Ten of these have ESOPs. This continues a pattern in which NCEO members consistently account for about one-third of the finalists and winners of Winning Workplaces' Top Small Workplaces awards.

In his new encyclical, Caritats in Veritate, Pope Benedict states that "alongside profit-oriented private enterprise and the various types of public enterprise, there must be room for commercial entities based on mutualist principles and pursuing social ends to take root and express themse

Recently, the SEC issued a new rule allowing employees with vested, unexercised stock options to use them as collateral to purchase call options as a way to obtain some cash value for the shares they can exercise.

The NCEO and CEP Institute at Santa Clara University jointly sponsored a survey of companies with employee stock purchase plans (ESPPs).

India's government has announced that it will eliminate the fringe benefit tax (FBT) on equity awards retroactive to April 1, 2009.