Related Practices
|
Covington lawyers regularly appear before Congress and federal agencies to advocate employee benefits legislative and regulatory proposals. We are deeply involved in many of the most important issues of the day, affecting such matters as pension funding, multiemployer plans, cash balance and other “hybrid” pension plans, the taxation of deferred compensation, and health care reform. Our clients for these matters include The ERISA Industry Committee (the voice of over 80 large public companies), individual companies, and ad hoc coalitions formed to pursue specific legislative or regulatory objectives.
By combining our government affairs expertise with our substantive knowledge regarding employee benefits, we create innovative legislative and regulatory solutions to many complex problems. Our approaches include:
- Drafting legislation and providing key support to members of Congress and their staffs to achieve legislative solutions for our clients and monitoring legislation to provide strategic advice to clients whose benefit programs may be affected;
- Providing input to regulators to formulate general guidance, including drafting comments and providing testimony on pending regulations, to achieve a workable regulatory environment for our clients;
- Seeking individual regulatory relief, for example by obtaining rulings or opinion letters, to resolve issues that affect our clients’ benefit programs; and
- Representing clients in governmental investigations and audits.
Representative Matters
Federal Legislation
These are a few of the many areas that Covington lawyers have helped to shape through federal legislation:
- Rules permitting employers to adopt cash balance and other “hybrid” pension plans;
- Improvements to the funding rules for multiemployer pension plans;
- Rules allowing employers to use surplus pension assets to fund retiree health and life insurance benefits;
- Diversification rules that apply to employer stock held in § 401(k) accounts;
- The tax treatment of long-term care insurance and corporate-owned life insurance;
- The tax treatment of nonqualified deferred compensation; and
- Restrictions on a state’s ability to tax the retirement income of a retiree who lives in a different state.
We are at the forefront of employee benefits policy. For example, in 2012, we (along with the Pension Rights Center and the Urban Institute) organized and led a conference on innovative pension designs called “Re-Imagining Pensions.” The conference was hosted by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, and was attended by the top officials covering pensions from the Departments of Treasury and Labor, the PBGC, and the Social Security Administration as well as several Congressional staff responsible for pensions.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|