New Members Named To The ERISA Advisory Council

Archived News Release — Caution: Information may be out of date.

Today Secretary of Labor Alexis M. Herman announced the five new members of the Advisory Committee on Employee Welfare and Pension Benefits, an advisory committee known more broadly as the ERISA Advisory Council. The Council is established by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA).

The new members, who will serve three-year terms, are James S. Ray of Washington, DC, representing employee organizations; Catherine L. Heron of Los Angeles, Calif., representing investment management; Carl T. Camden of Troy, Mich., representing corporate trust; Timothy J. Mahota of Santa Barbara, Calif., representing employer organizations, and Evelyn Adams of Miami, Fla., representing the general public.

The ERISA Advisory Council is comprised of 15 members from statutorily specified subject areas in employee benefits and related fields. Members, who serve staggered three-year terms, have an explicit charter to provide the Labor Secretary with policy recommendations and reports relating to private pension and other employee benefit issues. Council members will decide what issues to examine in 2000 at their first meeting, yet to be scheduled. In 1999, the Advisory Council broke into three working groups and considered the trend in the defined benefit market to hybrid plans, the possibility of using surplus pension assets to secure retiree health benefits, and the benefit implications of the growth of a contingent workforce.

The ERISA Advisory Council is a valued forum where representatives of employers, employees, the public and other employee benefit stakeholders discuss the many complex issues surrounding benefits law. It provides an opportunity for divergent groups to build consensus on public policy goals. For this reason, ERISA requires that the Council be comprised of three representatives of employee organizations (at least one of whom represents an organization whose members participate in a multiemployer plan); of employers (at least one of whom represents employers maintaining or contributing to multiemployer plans); and from the general public (one of whom represents those receiving benefits from a pension plan); as well as one representative each from the fields of insurance, corporate trust, actuarial counseling, investment counseling, investment management and accounting.

Attached are brief biographies of the five 2000 appointees.

2000 Appointees to the ERISA Advisory Council

James Ray, a senior partner of Connerton & Ray, a Washington law firm, has been a member of the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans (NCCMP), the national advocacy group for the Taft-Hartley community, for more than 20 years. On the governing council of the Labor and Employment Law Section, American Bar Association, he is listed among “Best Lawyers in America” in the Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory. Also a frequent speaker and writer on employee benefit and labor law topics, Ray was a plenary speaker at the National Summit on Retirement Savings called by President Clinton and the Congress.

Assistant general counsel of the Capital Group Companies (CGC) of Los Angeles, Catherine Heron formerly was with the Investment Company Institute as a vice president and senior counsel for 15 years. CGC is the investment adviser for the American Funds Group, the third largest mutual fund firm in the U.S. with more than $300 billion in assets. Heron was a special assistant on the Solicitor of Labor’s staff and also worked in the Labor Department’s Plan Benefits Security Division, which serves as the lawyers for the Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration, which, in turn, staffs the ERISA Advisory Council. Also, Heron was a member of the board of the Association of Private Pension and Welfare Plans and the Tax Section of the American Bar Association.

Carl Camden, executive vice president of field operations, sales and marketing for Kelly Services, Inc., previously was a senior vice president and director of corporate marketing with the bank holding company Key Corp. With more than 200,000 clients and some 750,000 employees annually, Kelly Services provides human resource solutions through 1,800 offices in 20 countries. He is past co-president of Wyse Advertising and co-owner of the North Coast Behavioral Research Group. He appeared before the 1999 ERISA Advisory Council’s working group on the benefit implications of a contingent workforce.

Timothy Mahota, general counsel, chief ERISA counsel and compliance officer for Mercer Global Advisors in Santa Barbara, formerly was with the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, a federal agency that insures defined benefit pension funds. Also, he has been an enforcement attorney with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as with Dean Witter Reynolds, Inc. and Kidder, Peabody & Company, Inc.

Evelyn Adams, an international project manager for IBM Global Services, will serve as one of the three representatives of the general public. She has been with IBM for 23 years. Nominated by the Pension Rights Center, she has been actively engaged in the ad hoc Employee Coalition, made up of employees from a number of America’s large corporations who converted their defined benefit plans to cash balance ones. As president of the IBM Employees Action Coalition (IBEAC), Adams also appeared before a 1999 ERISA Advisory Council working group studying trends in the defined benefit market to hybrid plans.

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