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Wednesday, September 19, 2007

It's 10 AM. Do you know where your retirement money is?
Posted by Jill | 10:06 AM
Some American Home Mortgage employees don't:

Bankrupt Melville-based American Home Mortgage is attempting to seize as much as $27 million that employees had set aside from their paychecks as retirement savings, and if it is successful, the workers may never see the money again.

In a flurry of objections filed in federal bankruptcy court here, employees around the country who contributed to AHM's deferred-compensation plan said its move to release the cash from a trust would put it in the hands of large creditors like banks and jeopardize their financial futures.

And the attorney for a group of former employees alleged AHM or its trustee for the retirement plan "may have acted inappropriately with regard to withholding distributions or encouraging contributions."

[snip]

The deferred-compensation plan enabled employees making more than about $200,000 per year to save money tax-free until they retired.

AHM has more than 1,000 creditors, some of which already have priority claims on the firm's assets and many of which are not expected to recoup any money.

Jeffrey Lewis, an employment benefits expert and partner with the Oakland, Calif., law firm Lewis, Feinberg, Lee, Renaker & Jackson, said it is not unusual for plans available only to select employees to end up in the hands of general creditors when companies go bankrupt.

"It's an unfortunate fact," he said. "They just don't meet the requirements for a regular, qualifying pension plan, and therefore the money is subject to the recapture of creditors."

Lewis said this would not be the first time American Home Mortgage has misled employees about retirement benefits. In 2003, he represented a group of loan officers hired when AHM acquired the retail branches of Principal Residential Mortgage Inc. He said AHM wooed employees by making promises about how it would contribute to and administer the new employees' 401(k) plans. The lender ultimately settled for about $2 million.


I don't know how many companies have this kind of self-administered 401(k) plan, and it could be argued that it's hard to feel sorry for people making over $200,000 a year selling bogus mortgages to people who can't afford them. But it seems to me that if an employee -- any employee -- can have his or her deferred compensation confiscated by company executives to pay off creditors as the result of bad management, it sets a very bad precedent.

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