Employee Ownership Blog

Congressman Dan Rohrabacher (R-CA) has introduced H.R. 6419, which would exclude employer stock received as part of a qualifying distribution from a defined contribution plan and then held for at least 10 years.

The Internal Revenue Service has published sample plan language to prevent violation of the Section 409(p) S ESOP corporation anti-abuse rules that prevent disqualified persons from ending up with more than 49.9% of the total deemed-owned shares of the company.

A new study of 328 majority ESOP-owned members of the ESOP Association by Brent Kramer has found that these companies have sales per employee that are 8.8% greater than comparable non-ESOP companies. 100% ESOP-owned companies did better than those that were over 50% but not 100%.

A new NCEO issue brief, The State of Broad-Based Employee Equity Plans, looks at research on the prevalence of these plans, who participates in them, and how they have changed in the last decade.

According to a new IRS analysis of wealth holdings, the top 47,000 families in the U.S. (those with over $20 million in assets) owned $1.196 trillion in public and private corporate equity.

In the September-October issue of the NCEO's newsletter for members (the Employee Ownership Report), I reported that 400 steelworkers at ESOP-owned Appleton Inc. (Appleton has approximately 3,000 employees) had gone on strike.

On May 1, the U.S. Cost Accounting Standards Board issued final rules for reimbursable costs for government contractors that have ESOPs. Since the 1980s, there has been considerable uncertainty about how the costs of funding an ESOP would be treated.

Data on the extent and effectiveness of broad-based equity plans in closely held companies are scarce and based on samples too limited to be persuasive, but we recently came across one significant exception. In "Give Everyone a Prize?

Innovation has become the defining feature of successful companies in today's market. People often think about business innovation in terms of high-technology, but any company can be innovative in ways large and small.

Winning Workplaces and the Wall Street Journal will hold their annual conference to honor the 15 top "winning workplaces" for 2008 in Chicago October 14-15. Last year, five of the winners were NCEO members, and employee ownership will again be on the agenda this year.

NCEO member Stock & Option Solutions is conducting a brief equity compensation market research study. It will make the data available to the NCEO for analysis. The survey contains questions about technical resources, net exercise provisions, and biggest challenges in equity compensation.

In "S Corp ESOP Legislation Benefits and Costs: Public Policy and Tax Analysis," Steven Freeman and Michael Knoll of the University of Pennsylvania conclude that S corporation ESOPs add an annual $14 billion in additional compensation that would not have been paid absent an ESOP, lead to annual j