PROFESSOR PRINCE PUBLISHES ARTICLE IN YALE LAW & POLICY REVIEW
February 2023 — Professor Samantha J. Prince recently published an article in the Yale Law & Policy Review titled “Megacompany Employee Churn Meets 401(k) Vesting Schedules: A Sabotage on Workers’ Retirement Wealth.”
The article describes how vesting schedules negatively impact the ability of American workers to adequately save for retirement. “Megacompany” includes alarming data on the number of predominately low-income workers that are terminating employment before becoming fully vested in their benefits. For example, Amazon and Home Depot recorded 236,751 and 129,766 participants terminating employment prior to full vesting in 2021, respectively. This crisis has the potential to exacerbate existing class and race-based disparities in intergenerational wealth accumulation.
To address this concerning trend, “Megacompany” proposes that immediate vesting is required for all employer contributions to retirement plans. Alternatively, Prof. Prince suggests that the IRS re-configures the rules surrounding partial plan terminations, which was the subject of an article published last fall in the NYU Review on Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation. Prince also encourages the Department of Labor to collect more comprehensive data on employee turnover prior to vesting.
Professor Prince was also interviewed on the Business Scholarship Podcast on this topic.
Professor Samantha Prince is an Assistant Professor of Law and Director of Legal Analysis & Writing at Dickinson Law. She has a Master of Laws in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center and was a partner in a regional law firm where she handled transactional matters that ranged from an initial public offering to regular representation of a publicly-traded company. Most of her clients were small to medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs, including start-ups. A significant part of her practice was in employee benefits including retirement plan design and operation. An expert in entrepreneurship law, she established the Dickinson Law entrepreneurship program, is an advisor for the Entrepreneurship Law Certificate that is available to students, and is the founder and moderator of the Inside Entrepreneurship Law blog.