Employee Ownership Blog

Knight Kiplinger, editor in chief of the widely read Kiplinger letters, has urged that to fix excessive CEO pay, companies should start spreading ownership to all employees. Kiplinger says his "personal favorite" approach is the ESOP, but he would also favor granting options to all employees.

NCEO members can now nominate themselves for the NCEO board. The term is three years. Expenses are not paid, but the annual conference fee can be waived. There is one required annual meeting, the afternoon before and morning of the annual conference.

The new automatic enrollment provisions for 401(k) plans in the Pension Protection Act allow companies to meet the 401(k) testing rules if they provide automatic enrollment (that is, employees opt out instead of opting in) that has the following features:

The Securities and Exchange Commission has expanded its inquiry into backdated stock options to over 100 companies. SEC Enforcement Division Director Linda Thomsen also has promised to pursue "spring-loading" cases (issuing options just before the release of good news).

As I noted in a recent column, most of the winners of the 2006 Winning Workplaces awards for companies with the "best bosses" went to companies with broad employee ownership.

NCEO members can now nominate themselves for the NCEO board. The term is three years. Expenses are not paid, but the annual conference fee can be waived. There is one required annual meeting, held during the afternoon before and morning of the annual conference.

Unable to come up with final regulations in time for companies to implement changes by the end 2006, the IRS has postponed the effective date of new deferred compensation requirements under Internal Revenue Code Section 409A until the end of 2007.

Winning Workplaces, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping organizations create great workplaces, recently named 18 companies winners of its annual "Best Bosses" competition. Fourteen share ownership broadly with employees.

On October 6-7, the Russell Sage Foundation and the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) held a two-day session in New York to discuss the results of a multi-year NBER research project on "shared capitalism" (employee ownership, profit sharing, and gainsharing).

A recent study published by the University of Maryland and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York ("ESOP Fables: The Impact of Employee Stock Ownership Plans on Labor Disputes," by Peter Campton, Hamid Mehran, and Joseph Tracy, 2005) reports that unionized public companies saw a significant decline

On September 19, the SEC's chief accountant issued guidance on the circumstances under which companies must restate their financials if they discover historical problems with the timing of their stock option grants.

According to the authoritative data compiled annually by the Employee Benefit Research Institute and the Investment Company Institute, company stock held by employees in 401(k) plans continued to decline in 2005, standing now at just 13% of total 401(k) assets, down from 19% in 1996 and 16% in 20