PROFESSOR SAMANTHA PRINCE TO PRESENT AT WIDENER COMMONWEALTH LAW SCHOOL
March 2022 — On April 19, 2022, Professor Samantha Prince will present her article on the disparate impact that employee churn has on retirement wealth at Widener Commonwealth Law School.
She will be presenting her article, Megacompany Employee Churn Meets 401(k) Vesting Schedules: A Sabotage on Workers’ Retirement Wealth, as part of Widener Commonwealth’s Faculty Development series. Professor Prince’s research shows that several large high turnover businesses use retirement plan vesting schedules that foreclose their employees from vesting in employer contributions made to the plans on their behalf. For example, when employees leave Amazon before the end of their third year of service, they walk away with no Amazon contributions that were made on their behalf. Instead, that money is reallocated to reduce future Amazon contributions or administrative fees. Allowing megacompanies who know they have high turnover to do this is against public policy. And it exacerbates retirement wealth inequality.
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. 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.