Also known as: employee benefit plan · employee benefits plan · employee benefits plans · EBP · ERISA plan
Written by attorneys · grounded in primary & secondary sources — see below
A retirement or welfare arrangement established by an employer to provide benefits such as pensions or health coverage to employees and their dependents. Corporate statutes treat service as a trustee or fiduciary of such a plan at the corporation's request as qualifying service for purposes of indemnification and insurance.
Elemental Pharmaceuticals asked its research director Elise Everly to serve as trustee of an employee stock ownership plan holding company shares. Regulators later sued Elise for alleged breaches tied to both her officer role and her trustee duties. Elemental maintained a liability policy covering Elise in both capacities.
After Isaac Boggs died, his second wife claimed community-property rights in pension benefits from an employee benefit plan that Isaac had designated for his first wife. The first wife's children asserted that ERISA preempted the state community-property claim and protected the plan's beneficiary designation.
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David Egelhoff named his wife as beneficiary of both a life insurance policy and a pension plan governed by an employee benefit plan. After the couple divorced, David died without changing the designations. His children from a prior marriage sued under a state statute that automatically revoked the former spouse's interest in nonprobate assets.
The United States asserted a federal tax lien against a taxpayer's interest in an employee benefit plan. The taxpayer argued that state law protections for certain plan interests prevented the lien from attaching. The government contended that federal tax law determines the scope of the taxpayer's property rights in the plan.
Yes. Model Business Corporation Act section 8.57 expressly authorizes a corporation to purchase and maintain insurance for a director or officer who serves at the corporation's request as a trustee or fiduciary of an employee benefit plan. Coverage is permitted regardless of whether the corporation could indemnify the same liability.
Yes. Model Business Corporation Act section 8.51(b) provides that a director's conduct with respect to an employee benefit plan satisfies the statutory standard when the director reasonably believed the conduct served the interests of the plan's participants and beneficiaries.
ERISA section 514(a) preempts state laws that relate to employee benefit plans. Courts have applied this preemption to state community-property claims and automatic-revocation statutes that would alter plan beneficiary designations.
…of marriage or a declaration of invalidity.” § 11.07.010(1). It defines “nonprobate asset” to include “a life insurance policy, employee benefit plan, annuity or similar contract, or individual retirement account.” § 11.07.010(5)(a). Respondents argued that they were entitled to the life insurance proceeds because the Washington statute…