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Alvin D. Lurie Receives Lifetime Employee Benefits Achievement Award

Excerpt: "BenefitsLink congratulates Alvin D. Lurie for having received the Lifetime Employee Benefits Achievement Award from the Employee Benefits Committee of the American Bar Association's Section on Taxation.... Al's broad experience with employee benefit plan operation, design and policy, coupled with his gift for clever and insightful writing (I think of him as the Mark Twain of ERISA) make him a national treasure."

Corrected Address for Alvin D. Lurie, Author of 'This Time is the Sky Really Falling on DB Plans?' (PDF)

An earlier version of Mr. Lurie's splendid article contained an outdated address and phone number at the end of the article; a corrected version of the article is available at this link, showing his correct address (Larchmont NY, phone (914) 834-6725). We regret the error!

Alvin D. Lurie Dies at 92

We report with great sadness the death of Alvin D. "Al' Lurie Nov. 17, 2015. Most recently Of Counsel to the Wagner Law Group, Al"s career spanned decades of service in the employer-sponsored retirement plan arena. He was the first person to be appointed Assistant Commissioner (Employee Plans and Exempt Organizations) under ERISA, a prolific author, an AV-rated attorney in private practice, and a Charter Fellow of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel. Al will be greatly missed.

Al Lurie on the Decline in Defined Benefit Plans: 'The Canaries Sing But They Sing Not To Thee'

Excerpt: The subject is pensions. The mine is the deepening descent of defined benefit plans as they continually plunge in popularity, with a corresponding decline in numbers; while the canaries are the signs of danger in the mine. Thee are all those who can play a role in digging pensions out of this hole, but do not heed the warnings.

Al Lurie: Numbers Game In Congress Stalls Pension Reform and Cash Balance Legislation (PDF)

6 pages. Excerpt: As these lines are being written, the conference committee and its staffs are at work on that task that might spell life or death for the defined benefit scheme and, not so incidentally, for its cash balance variant.

Toward a Trusty Test to Track, and Tax, the Tax Shelters

Prominent ERISA attorney Alvin D. Lurie asks, "How is one to know the bounds of the law in a universe where no one has been able to draw a generally recognized boundary line between abusive and nonabusive tax shelters?"

Murphy's Law Has IBM Singing the Big Blues (PDF)

8 pages. Pension attorney Al Lurie analyzes (skewers?) the district court's reasoning in the recent Cooper v. IBM case, holding IBM's cash balance plan to be illegal under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.

Obama's Trojan Horse: The 3.8% 'Unearned Income Medicare Contribution' Provision in the ACA

"One has to believe it was no accident that the Tax Code amendment [adding section 1411 to the Internal Revenue Code] is buried deep within and close to the end of the nearly 3,000-page two-part legislative package. Doubtless only a relatively few who read the ACA before (or even after) its enactment got as far as section 1402 of HCRA; and, of those few, even fewer were searching for new tax legislation in that section or recognized the enormous impact of Section 1411 as an income tax rather than the payroll tax that its 'Medicare' title connoted.... But it is not clear how that strategy will play out in the Supreme Court when, as seems likely, a case testing the tax standing of Section 1411 appears on the Court's docket."

The So-Called 3.8% Medicare Surtax: Unfit for Survival

"Section 1411 of the IRC, often erroneously called a Medicare surtax, is in actuality not that at all, and is rather in every respect a completely separate, full-blown, second income tax imposed on individual taxpayers, on trusts and estates, and indirectly on passive owners of interests in S corporations, LLCs and partnerships, on recipients of interests in qualified pension and other qualified plans and charitable remainder trusts inter alia -- an extraordinarily wide swath of taxpayers.... Even more problematic than the misleadingly false labeling of the tax is the establishment, as part of the Affordable Care Act, of a complicated, unbelievably difficult second income tax for the sole purpose of providing the government funds required to administer the health reform law, as long into the future as that legislation remains on the books."

Unfinished Fiscal Fix -- But the Cliff Is Still There

"There is ... a litany of other taxes, penalties and fees introduced in the ACA ... [that] could legitimately be brought to bear by Republicans in addressing the fiscal cliff problem ... inasmuch as they, like the Medicare taxes, have been designed to hit high bracket businesses and individuals, by reason of being (i) targeted at big businesses (viz., medical device makers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and health insurance companies), or (ii) drafted with specific thresholds based on size of business payrolls or on individuals' income levels, as regards health insurance or self-insurance mandates imposed on businesses, or relating to insurance that individuals must purchase for themselves or their families, or (iii) imposed on the purchase of a specific luxury health item colloquially called a 'Cadillac insurance plan.'"