We did it! The Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Relief Act has passed the U.S. Senate and is expected to be signed into law within a week.
www.tdu.org
Below is the article in the COVID Bill itself!!!!!
Background
The multiemployer pension system in the United States is currently in crisis, with over 100 multiemployer pension plans, covering more than one million participants in total, projected to become insolvent within the next 10 to 20 years. The largest and most significant of these plans, the Central States, Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund (the “CSPF”), is projected to become insolvent by 2025. Under existing law, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (the “PBGC”) provides financial assistance to a plan after it becomes insolvent that is sufficient to allow the plan to continue paying benefits up to the level guaranteed by the PBGC. However, the scope of the crisis, and the pending insolvency of the CSPF, is projected to cause the PBGC’s own multiemployer insurance fund to become insolvent by 2026. This issue has created significant concern among individual participants, contributing employers, unions, and plans themselves. As a result, Congress has previously made several attempts to enact a legislative solution, including the establishment of the bicameral Joint Select Committee on Solvency of Multiemployer Pension Plans in 2018, but these attempts have largely failed to date.
The ARPA attempts to address these issues by creating and funding a special financial assistance program intended to extend the solvency of severely underfunded multiemployer plans, including the CSPF, by providing one-time payments intended to allow the plans to continue paying all benefits through 2051, which in turn should also allow the PBGC’s existing multiemployer insurance fund to avoid insolvency. Importantly, and unlike many previous proposals, there is nothing in the ARPA that requires plans that receive the special financial assistance to repay the assistance.
We did it! The Butch Lewis Emergency Pension Relief Act has passed the U.S. Senate and is expected to be signed into law within a week.
www.tdu.org