FIVE BENEFITS PROFESSIONALS NAMED TO ERISA ADVISORY COUNCIL

Archived News Release — Caution: Information may be out of date.

Secretary of Labor Alexis M. Herman today announced the appointment of five new members to the Advisory Council on Employee Welfare and Pension Benefit Plans who will represent various sectors of the employee benefits field.

The ERISA Advisory Council, which is comprised of 15 members named by the Secretary of Labor, submits policy recommendations concerning the implementation of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). Appointments are normally for three years and no more than eight members can be from any one political party, according to the federal pension law.

Two persons who agreed to fill one-year unexpired terms during the Advisory Council’s 1998 session have been named to their own three-year appointments. They are Janie Greenwood- Harris, who completed the unexpired term of Rick McGahey (now Assistant Secretary of Policy for DOL) and Judith F. Mazo, who assumed the unexpired term of Vivian Hobbs, who died in 1997.

The three other new members are Patrick McTeague of West Bath, Maine, representing the general public; Rebecca Miller of Rochester, Minn., the accounting industry representative, and Michael J. Stapley of Bountiful, Utah, the insurance industry representative.

Greenwood-Harris, who will continue representing employer organizations (multi- employer plans), is a senior ERISA attorney for Mercantile BanCorporation of St. Louis, Mo., where she administers employee benefit trusts and other types of employee benefit accounts. She previously was with Citizens and Southern Bank of Columbia, S.C.(now NationsBank), First Trust in Nashville, Tenn., and the Labor Department in Nashville as a labor attorney. In addition to her previous service on the Advisory Council, Greenwood-Harris is active in the Metropolitan St. Louis YWCA board and serves on national YWCA committees and with the United Way and Catholic Charities of St. Louis.

Mazo is a senior vice president and director of research for the Segal Company in Washington. She chaired the Advisory Council’s 1998 working group on the disclosure of health care quality. Previously she was engaged in private law practice in Washington, specializing in ERISA and served as a special counsel to the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). She also served as a consultant to the pension task force of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and Labor, as a senior attorney at PBGC and as executive assistant to its general counsel from 1975-79. She is a member of the Pension Research Council of the Wharton School and on the editorial advisory boards of the BNA Pension Reporter, the Benefits Law Journal, active with the American Bar Association as chair of its task force on PBGC legislation of the tax section on the employee benefits committee, co-chair of the employee benefits committee of the labor law section and a member of the real property, probate and trust section. An active member of the National Coordinating Committee for Multi-employer Plans, Mazo recently began serving on the department’s Negotiated Rulemaking Advisory Committee, created by the Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration (PWBA) to develop a proposed rule establishing criteria and a process for determining when an employee benefit plan is established or maintained under a collective bargaining agreement.

Although semi-retired, McTeague remains with the Topsham, Maine law firm he helped found in 1976, McTeague, Higbee, MacAdam, Case, Watson & Cohen, where he concentrates on labor law, ERISA, employment discrimination and workers’ compensation. He was a member of the Maine House of Representatives from 1968 to 1974, assistant Democratic floor leader from 1970 to 1974, the prime sponsor of the Maine Human Rights Act and a leader in environmental protection, economic development, worker protection, government reorganization, state income tax and educational funding legislation. Also with the Maine Judicial Council from 1971-1975, he frequently appears as a panelist and lecturer before national and state labor and legal seminars involving labor law, ERISA, fair employment practices and workers’ compensation.

Stapley is president and chief executive officer of Deseret Mutual Insurance Company and Deseret Mutual Benefit Administrators (DMBA) and a trustee for Deseret Healthcare Employee Benefits Trust of Salt Lake City. DMBA also is trustee of the company’s pension trust. These companies collectively provide a range of benefits to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its affiliated organizations, with 30 separate employers as clients and some 130,000 plan participants. With the company since October, 1984 serving in various capacities until his promotion as president and CEO in 1997, Stapley has administered both pension and health welfare plans subject to ERISA.

Previously with the Utah Department of Health since 1979 and its acting executive director in 1984, Stapley amassed an impressive background in health insurance, including the multiemployer environment, development of health care policy and reform and also managed retirement plans. Founder and chair of the Utah Health Information Network, he also chairs the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation steering committee responsible for providing low-cost insurance to small employers, as well as service on several other health-related statewide committees. He is working with the Reforming States Group, sponsored by Milbank Memorial Fund, as well as the National Association of Health Data Organizations and the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Representing the accounting profession will be Miller, who was nominated by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). She was a tax law specialist with McGladrey & Pullen, LLP in Rochester since 1979 on ERISA issues and has been a partner since 1984. Responsible for tax issues for all kinds of employee benefit plans and in an advisory relationship to audit and accounting offices on ERISA reporting issues, she numbers among her private sector clients C corporations, S corporations and partnerships. She also assists not-for-profit entities including labor organizations, trade associations and professional groups. On AICPA’s employee benefits committee since 1995 and on its employer stock option plan (ESOP) task force previously, she also is involved with the Profit Sharing Council, the ESOP Association and the National Center for Employee Ownership. She’s a regular presenter at various industry conferences and is well known to PWBA, which administers Title I of ERISA. She appeared before the agency’s 5500 joint panel hearings on the topic in 1997.

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Archived News Release — Caution: Information may be out of date.

Contact Name: Sharon Morrissey
Phone Number: (202) 219-8921