President Obama recently Responded to an ESOP Question at a town hall meeting in Richmond, Virginia:

 

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Last week the IRS conducted a phone forum on Abusive Tax Avoidance Transactions (ATATs) and Emerging Issues. The handout referenced an ESOP adopted by an LLC:

Last June we provided a recap of the ESOP Update Phone Forum Recap: Diversification, Rebalancing, and Reshuffling. The IRS has posted a transcript of the call:

Yesterday we discussed the Review of 5500 Data that concluded that ESOP Companies Offer More Generous Retirement Benefits than their non-ESOP counterparts. A press release shares more of the findings:

I will be presenting Distribution Policies and Procedures/Repurchase Liability on Thursday, September 23 at 1 pm, in Minneapolis as part of the 2010 Midwest ESOP Regional Conference:

The NCEO published the results of ESOPs as Retirement Benefits. The NCEO a reviewed the DOL IRS Form 5500 data for just under 4,000 ESOP companies or approximately 38% of all ESOPs and came up with some "clear conclusions":

The Employee Ownership Foundation published the results of the 19th Annual ESOP Economic Performance Survey (EPS). The survey found that ESOP companies on the whole continue to have "share value, better productivity, and overwhelming support among leaders". In addition, 91% of respondents reported that creating an ESOP was a "good business decision that has helped the company" and 61% of responding companies have created an ESOP education program or ESOP advisory committee since establishing the ESOP:

Holman Jenkins's column on Sam Zell and the Chicago Tribune attributes a lot of the problem to what Mr. Jenkins refers to as the tax "loophole" of the employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). ESOPs are hardly a loophole. More than a dozen pieces of legislation have been passed over 35 years providing a legal framework and tax incentives for these plans. No less a conservative icon than Ronald Reagan was warmly supportive of ESOPs. Reagan told Polish unions that employee ownership was the best alternative to communism, and the idea has had broad, bipartisan support. Research by such luminaries as the National Bureau of Economic Research and academics has shown that ESOP companies are more successful than comparable conventional companies, that employees in ESOPs have 2.5 times the retirement assets of comparable employees, and that the particular kind of ESOP used in the Tribune deal actually provide a net tax gain to the federal government.

Earlier this week we covered the Senate HELP Committee Meeting that discussed S. 2909 - Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge Act (WORK Act) and S. 2914 - United States Employee Ownership Bank Act and how ESOPs Could Pull Country Out of Recession. This post contains video and written testimony from the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) committee meeting. Go to the bottom of this post for video of a roundtable discussion:

The August 31, 2010 Employee Ownership Update is online and discusses the following: