Businesses that grow and achieve scale beyond the efforts of the founder or owner rely on talented employees for their success. Structuring the right compensation and benefit plans for employees is crucial to the long-term health of a business. We know the ins and outs of integrating business needs with tax and accounting rules.
Our attorneys advise all of our business clients on their contractual arrangements with key employees and regularly establish, qualify, administer, and terminate a variety of benefits programs and even curate health savings accounts. We also represent employees who have been recruited to a new employer, or who are stepping up their role in a current enterprise, as to the terms of their employment contracts, including compensation.
Kleinbard’s attorneys understand that properly rewarding executive team members is crucial for retention and achieving business goals. Successful business executives and professionals often accumulate significant wealth in tax-qualified retirement accounts, either 401(k) plans or similar employer-sponsored plans, or in individual retirement accounts (traditional IRAs or Roth IRAs). We guide clients through the choices those plans present, especially when the plan participant changes jobs or retires, or when the plan participant dies and executors and beneficiaries face decisions. We can help clients fit these special assets into comprehensive plans for retirement income, estate distribution, and charitable giving, while reducing the impact of income and death taxes.
Our experience includes:
- Establishing 401(k) and employee stock ownership plans and Individual stock option plans
- Creating profit-sharing, money purchase pensions, defined benefit pensions
- Drafting non-qualified deferred compensation arrangements and various welfare benefit plan, including those in accordance with the Taft-Hartley Act
- Enacting executive fringe benefit arrangements
- Advising on incentive compensation plans and custom arrangements
- Developing split-dollar life insurance and employer-owned life insurance plans
- Providing guidance on golden parachute and excise tax arrangements
- Establishing tax-qualified pension plans (including multiemployer pension plans), tax-deferred annuities and custodial arrangements under Code §403(b), group health and welfare arrangements (including the Affordable Care Act and HIPAA privacy and security), equity-based compensation, and deferred compensation plans subject to Code §§ 409A and 457
