Journal article
SYMPOSIUM ENRON AND ITS AFTERMATH: THREE AND POSSIBLY FOUR LESSONS ABOUT ERISA THAT WE SHOULD, BUT PROBABLY WILL NOT, LEARN FROM ENRON
St. John's Law Review, Vol.76, pp.855-1047
01 Oct 2002
Abstract
In 1974, when President Gerald Ford signed the Employment Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) into law in a Rose Garden ceremony on Labor Day, he predicted that because of the new law "the men and women of our labor force will have much more clearly defined rights to pension funds and greater assurances that retirement dollars will be there when they are needed." 1 In many ways President Ford was prescient: many of ERISA's reforms have improved the retirement security of American workers, particularly in the areas of vesting, 2 plan funding, 3 and insurance protection for defined benefit plans. 4 In other areas, ERISA has not worked as well, at least from the perspective of the men and women of whom President Ford spoke at the Rose Garden ceremony. 5 Enron and similar corporate failures are only the latest illustration of some of the statute's shortcomings. This Article focuses on three particular shortcomings of the statute: ERISA sections 404(a)(2) 6 and 407(b), 7 which for defined contribution plans relax regulatory requirements restricting investment in stock of the sponsoring employer; ERISA section 404(c), 8 which provides incentives for firms sponsoring defined contribution plans to shift responsibility for portfolio allocation to plan participants; and ERISA section 408(c), 9 which expressly permits directors and employees of a plan's sponsor to serve as plan fiduciaries and implicitly permits them to make critical judgments on issues pitting the interest of the plan's sponsor (or the managing employees of the sponsor) ...
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Details
- Title
- SYMPOSIUM ENRON AND ITS AFTERMATH: THREE AND POSSIBLY FOUR LESSONS ABOUT ERISA THAT WE SHOULD, BUT PROBABLY WILL NOT, LEARN FROM ENRON
- Creators
- Norman Stein
- Publication Details
- St. John's Law Review, Vol.76, pp.855-1047
- Publisher
- St. John's Law Review Association St. John's Law Review
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Thomas R. Kline School of Law
- Identifiers
- 991021867175304721