The Ninth Circuit held that employer contributions due to a Taft Hartley fund are not plan assets until they are actually paid to the fund, irrespective of whether the plan document defines plan assets to include unpaid employer contributions.  As a result, a fund could not hold a contributing employer’s owner and treasurer personally liable for breach of fiduciary duty for failure to pay the contributions. (The employer was found liable for delinquent contributions under ERISA § 515.)  The Ninth Circuit’s decision deepens a split between, on the one hand, the Sixth and Tenth Circuits, which have similarly rejected such claims, and, on the other hand, the Second and Eleventh Circuits, which have recognized that unpaid contributions may be plan assets where the plan document defines plan assets as including unpaid employer contributions.  The case is Glazing Health and Welfare Fund v. Lamek, No. 16-16155, 2018 WL 1403579 (9th Cir. Mar. 21, 2018).

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Photo of Neil V. Shah Neil V. Shah

Neil V. Shah is a member of the Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Group, where he focuses on ERISA litigation.

He is the lead attorney representing the firm’s Taft-Hartley plan clients in withdrawal liability and delinquent contributions matters.  As part of his practice…

Neil V. Shah is a member of the Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Group, where he focuses on ERISA litigation.

He is the lead attorney representing the firm’s Taft-Hartley plan clients in withdrawal liability and delinquent contributions matters.  As part of his practice, Neil pursues employers, their owners and officers, and affiliated companies to collect the amounts owed to these plans using a variety of complex legal theories, and has secured several precedential opinions and multi-million-dollar judgments in their favor.  Neil also defends these plans in arbitrations challenging the methods and assumptions used to calculate withdrawal liability, which has yielded a number of notable arbitration decisions and court opinions.  Owing to his experience in this area, Neil is a co-editor of the withdrawal liability chapter of the premier employee benefits treatise, Employee Benefits Law, published by Bloomberg, and regularly presents on the topic before practitioners and consultants that work in the area, such as at meetings of the Conference of Consulting Actuaries and the Employee Benefits Section of ABA’s Section of Labor & Employment Law.

In addition to his Taft-Hartley plan experience, Neil has represented several plan sponsors and fiduciaries in ERISA class actions alleging that the plan’s investments or other practices are imprudent, such as excessive fee and stock drop cases.

Prior to joining Proskauer, Neil was an associate at a large regional firm, where he litigated individual and class actions involving challenges to insurer claims adjudication procedures under ERISA, fraud recoveries against healthcare providers, and claims for benefits.

Neil has authored several articles, including those published in the New Jersey Law Journal and Bloomberg National Affairs.  He is also a frequent contributor to Proskauer’s Employee Benefits & Executive Compensation Blog.