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The NCEO ESOP Corporate Governance Survey is designed to help companies learn how other companies are handling the unique governance issues faced by ESOPs. This year’s survey collected responses through May and June from 302 privately held ESOP companies.

Last month, the NCEO released its 2022 Executive Compensation report, an analysis of compensation-related survey responses from 380 privately held ESOP companies.

NCEO research in this newsletter (see page 4) shows a mixed trend for private-company ESOPs—a slight decrease (1.2%) in plans from 2014 to 2019, accompanied by a larger change, positive this time, in active participants (an increase of 5.7%) over the same period.

It took an internship in Ukraine for me to realize how amazing US ESOPs are.

If you want an audience of people from ESOP companies, offer them new data about the repurchase obligation.

The biggest development in employee ownership covered in this newsletter is the release of new research by the NCEO and sponsored by ESCA.

As we described in the January newsletter the number of participants in private ESOPs increased by 5.7% from 2014 to 2019 even as the number of plans decreased by 1.2% over the same period.

The total number of ESOPs has been in slow decline over the past several years, dropping from 7,138 plans in 2010 to 6,660 in 2016 (the most recent year for which reliable data is available from the Department of Labor).

A fair amount of information about the roughly 6,400 U.S. ESOPs can be gleaned from public records of their Form 5500 filings.

A recently published NCEO report explored the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ESOP and non-ESOP companies in the U.S. food production, distribution, and sales industries.