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Our friends at the Beyster Institute in the Rady School of Management at the University of California at San Diego have just opened registration for their new training program for ESOP service providers.

A new bill in Colorado, HB24-1157, would provide statutory authority for the Colorado Employee Ownership Office, which Governor Jared Polis created in 2020 through an executive order. The bill would make the office permanent.

Colorado has become the first state to pass a law that helps cover some of the costs to convert to employee ownership. On June 23, Governor Polis signed into law H.B. 21-1311, a bill that makes sweeping changes to Colorado tax law, notably a provision to provide $10 million annually in tax credits over the next six years to fund the professional service costs of conversions to employee ownership.

According to the latest data available from the Department of Labor, there were 6,660 ESOPs sponsored by 6,365 companies as of the end of 2016. These plans cover 14.3 million participants and hold close to $1.4 trillion in plan assets. A total of 10.7 million participants are active employees.

A new process agreement between the Department of Labor and Farmers National Bank (FNB) was made public on February 28. It lays out a much more detailed process for evaluating whether an ESOP actually has and can pay for control.

We recently released three new ESOP-related books: Don't Do That with Your ESOP! 3rd ed., Executive and Director Compensation in ESOP Companies, 8th ed., and Banks as ESOP Sponsors.

A new NCEO study found that, over the last 10 years, 68 private company ESOP court cases had results in settlements or judgments that cost the defendants a total of $385.5 million. The average payout per employee in these cases was $14,400 per participant.

The NCEO now has comprehensive guides to active and pending state and federal legislation on our website.

On October 15, the NCEO released a new publication, A Guide to DOL ESOP Investigations, that provides the first comprehensive and quantitative analysis of the Department of Labor’s ESOP investigations.

The NCEO just completed a large grant-funded project examining whether and how employee ownership affected companies and employees in the U.S. food system during the COVID-19 pandemic.