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Bankruptcy Court Declines to Exclude Retirement Plan from Estate

Posted on Nov. 19, 2018

Congratulations to Keith Fogg on his new grandchild, Samuel! And now, back to tax procedure. Christine  

The case of In re Xiao, No. 13-51186 (Bankr. D. Conn 2018) presents the unusual situation of a bankruptcy court analyzing whether the pension plan of debtor’s corporation met the qualifications required by the Internal Revenue Code for such a plan. Here, it was not the IRS attacking the validity of the pension plan, though it might have if it had noticed. Rather, the bankruptcy trustee brought the action seeking a determination that the plan did not qualify in order to bring the money in the pension plan into the bankruptcy estate. Because the plan held over $400,000 in assets, it provided a rich target for creditors of the estate. Of course, the trustee also has a financial incentive to bring assets into the estate since the more assets the estate contains the larger the fee received by the trustee. Regardless of the financial incentive, bringing the asset into the estate for use to pay the unsecured creditors also fulfills the trustee’s obligation to the estate.

As a general rule B.C. 541(c)(2) excludes a debtor’s pension plan from the bankruptcy estate. The Supreme Court confirmed this reading of the statute a quarter of a century ago in Patterson v. Shumate, 504 U.S. 753 (1992). The exclusion from the bankruptcy estate does not cover everything labeled as a pension plan. Excluded plans must meet certain criteria. Even if not excluded by BC 541(c)(2), funds could be exempted from the estate under B.C. 522. Few cases exist in which trustees have successfully attacked a plan to bring its assets into the bankruptcy estate. The trustee’s success in this case demonstrates the possibilities of such an action and also the perils to someone who fails to follow all of the necessary formalities for maintaining a proper plan. Even if you believe that the IRS has so few people looking at these plans that the chances of an IRS audit remain slim, the Xiao case shows another way in which failure to properly maintain a pension plan can create problems.

The court here spends several pages recounting the inappropriate manner in which the pension plan of debtor’s corporation was established and administered. The details of the administration of this plan suggested many lapses in following the necessary formalities to properly maintain a plan. The trustee hired an expert to examine plan activity and to testify concerning plan failures. In effect, the expert hired by the trustee acted like a revenue agent performing an audit of the plan. He explained in great detail the plan’s failures. The trustee charges the estate for the cost of the expert and the cost of the litigation attacking the plan. In essence, the plan assets will pay for the cost of the attack. The debtor’s creditors do not mind because even though these costs reduce the funds available from the plan, the trustee still brings into the estate money not otherwise available. The loser here is the debtor who sees his entire pension plan used to fund the attack on the plan and to pay creditors who would not otherwise have had the opportunity to get paid from this asset.

Debtor also hired an expert who testified about the plan in order to prove it was appropriately administered. Debtor himself testified on this point as well. The court did not find the debtor credible and did not find his expert persuasive.

After a detailed examination of the plan, the court found that it did not operate in a manner that allowed the debtor to exclude or exempt this asset. The concluding paragraph of the opinion provides the best overview of the court’s reasoning:

…the Plan failures at issue in this case do not merely constitute technical defaults, but instead are operational failures that ‘are substantial violations of the core qualification requirements for a retirement’ plan as set forth in the IRC Section 401(a)(2). … it appears that LXEng [debtor’s corporation] operated the Plan in order to solely benefit Mr. Xiao and his then spouse, Ms. Chen. According to the Treasury Regulations, a plan cannot act as a subterfuge for the distribution of profits to the owners of the employer. 26 C.F.R 1.401-1(b)(3). It appears to have been so here.

The opinion does not explain how the trustee came to the conclusion that the debtor’s plan did not meet muster. Because I have seen few of these cases over the years, I do not think that many trustees key in on this issue and perhaps the taxpayer’s failure to follow plan formalities represents a rare aberration. I suspect that there may be a number of plans of small businesses with problems that could be attacked by a trustee if the business owner seeks bankruptcy relief and tries to shelter assets in a pension plan. The former employees of the business that this plan did not properly cover could have had claims against the bankruptcy estate. Such employees may have provided the trustee a roadmap to unlocking the assets in the plan. While I am just speculating that one of the employees the plan sought to stiff provided critical information about the inadequacies of the plan, this serves as yet another reminder why employers should keep employees happy and not overtly antagonize them.

The court stresses that it tests qualification of the plan as of the date of the filing of the bankruptcy petition. For any small business where the owner is headed for bankruptcy, the Xiao case should serve as a significant wake-up call regarding the proper administration of a pension plan. The debtor here loses an asset that the creditors could not have reached had the plan been properly administered. Conversely, the case also serves as a reminder to attorneys for creditors that they should pay attention to pension plans in the case of small businesses to look for improper administration of the plan as a way to pull the asset into the bankruptcy estate that might otherwise have few assets for the unsecured creditors. Hiring an expert to do the analysis of the plan and pursuing the litigation to get information about the plan serve as barriers where the plan assets are not significant and information about plan administration does not suggest problems worth pursuing.

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