Timothy Garbinsky
The Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing named Dr. Adria Scharf as its new director, succeeding Dr. Bill Castellano as of July 1.
NCEO Events & Webinars
Mergers and acquisitions have become an increasingly common growth strategy for ESOP companies, and a recent NCEO webinar with Hillary Hughes and Will Hobby of Prairie Capital Advisors offered a timely look at one particular path: the ESOP to ESOP merger. Their session made clear that this strategy is gaining traction, with polling during the webinar showing that roughly two thirds of attendees have already seriously evaluated acquiring another company.
Corey Rosen
Employee ownership figures prominently in Time magazine’s brand-new list of America's Best Private Companies of 2026. Fourteen of the top 100 companies are employee-owned; 13 are partially or entirely ESOP-owned, and 1 company is partly owned through an employee ownership trust. The list includes 500 companies; we looked at the top 100. Time partnered with Statista to “evaluate and rank the most prominent firms in the country based on employee satisfaction, financial performance, and sustainability transparency. Both public companies and private companies that report their financial and sustainability data were considered.” Details on the methodology can be found here.
Corey Rosen
Senators Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) added an amendment (PDF) to S. 3333, the Emergency Savings Enhancement Act of 2025, that would dramatically increase funding for the Employee Ownership Initiative in the US Department of Labor (DOL). The initiative is part of the WORK Act, which was incorporated into the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. The WORK Act established the Employee Ownership Initiative in the DOL to serve as a clearinghouse for information on employee ownership and, more importantly, provide funding for state employee ownership outreach and education programs. While the WORK Act authorized funds for the program, they were never appropriated. In 2025, the DOL administratively set aside $2 million for the program.
Scott Rodrick
Rep. Perry Scott (R-PA) introduced the Employee Ownership Fairness Act of 2026 in the House on July 20. The bill is a companion to the Employee Ownership Fairness Act of 2025, introduced by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in the Senate on May 13, 2025, and discussed on this blog at that time. The bills would largely remove limits on ESOP contributions and allocations.
NCEO Events & Webinars
Insights from the NCEO June Community Conversation
When ESOP practitioners gather to talk honestly about the repurchase obligation, one of the first things worth reframing is the language itself. "Obligation" sounds like a burden, but as NCEO Peer Network Manager Kimberly McCourtney put it at the opening of the June Community Conversation, the repurchase obligation is a feature of your ESOP plan, not a bug. NCEO research shows that ESOP companies distributed $166 billion in 2023 alone. A growing repurchase obligation is, more often than not, a sign of a thriving company and a well-run plan.
Corey Rosen
The US Department of Labor (DOL) released its 2026 rule list, which states that it will issue ESOP valuation regulations in November 2026. The regulations are required by the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022. The DOL issued proposed regulations in December 2025, but they were rescinded along with all other pending regulations when the new administration took office the next month.
Corey Rosen
A new NCEO task force of trustees is examining how an ESOP company’s repurchase obligation should affect its stock value. The repurchase obligation can be a significant financial cost for ESOP companies, but this liability is currently not reflected on the balance sheet or income statement. Historically, valuation firms ignored the potential impact of repurchase obligations, arguing that the company could always simply be sold and the obligation would go away. The effect of this in some companies was that they were forced to sell to meet their repurchase obligations, whereas they would not have had to if the share price had been adjusted all along for the ongoing liability. In a few extreme cases, companies that had rapid cyclical growth followed by cyclical decline have found that their repurchase obligations to employees who left at a high point forced them into bankruptcy.
NCEO Events & Webinars
Making the move from a traditional corporate environment to an employee-owned company is a bigger shift than most leaders expect. In a recent NCEO webinar, Susan Bunz and Brian Kingery of Stellar Industries, a 100% employee-owned work truck equipment manufacturer, shared reflections on what that transition looks like from the inside. Their conversation, facilitated by leadership coach Melisa Gillis, surfaced some honest lessons for leaders at any stage of the ESOP journey.
