The Retire Through Ownership Act and the ESOP ERISA Bond

The Retire Through Ownership Act and the ESOP ERISA Bond: What Changed, and What Did Not

The Retire Through Ownership Act, signed on October 15, 2026, amends a single definition in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 and leaves every other provision of Title I where it found it. The amendment permits an employee stock ownership plan fiduciary to place good faith reliance on an independent appraisal grounded in Revenue Ruling 59-60 when determining whether the plan paid or received “adequate consideration” for employer securities under section 3(18) (Retire Through Ownership Act 2026). That is the whole of it. The statute does not touch section 412, the fidelity bonding mandate, and it says in terms that it does not modify a fiduciary’s obligations under section 404.

The question for the surety market is therefore not whether the Act rewrites the ESOP ERISA bond, because it does not, but whether it changes the economics around that bond. This essay argues that it does, in two respects that are easy to conflate and important to keep apart. First, the Act reprices a risk that the ESOP ERISA bond has never insured: the fiduciary’s exposure for overpaying for closely held stock. That exposure lives in fiduciary liability coverage, and its severity has just been reduced by statute. Second, the Act is calculated to expand the population of ESOPs, which means more plans subject to section 412 and more qualifying bonds to be written. The underwriting of each bond does not change; the number of them, and the conversation the broker must have alongside each one, does.

A third point tempers the first two. Because section 404 is untouched, the plaintiffs’ bar and the Department of Labor retain every process based theory they have ever pleaded against an ESOP trustee. Reliance on Revenue Ruling 59-60 is a reliance standard, not a safe harbor, and the fiduciary who treats the Act as the latter will learn the difference in discovery. The surety that packages an ESOP ERISA bond with a fiduciary liability referral should say so plainly, so that neither product is oversold.

The Adequate Consideration Problem Before the Act

ERISA has always treated the ESOP as a creature apart. Section 407(d)(6) defines it, section 408(e) exempts its acquisition of employer securities from the prohibited transaction rules on the condition that the plan pays no more than adequate consideration, and section 3(18)(B) in its original form defined adequate consideration for an asset with no generally recognized market as fair market value “as determined in good faith by the trustee or named fiduciary” pursuant to the terms of the plan and regulations of the Secretary (29 U.S.C. § 1002(18)). For fifty years the Secretary issued no final regulation. The Department of Labor proposed one on May 17, 1988, and never finalized it (Department of Labor 1988). Courts filled the vacuum.

The Fifth Circuit’s decision in Donovan v. Cunningham supplied the governing gloss. An ESOP fiduciary may rely on an independent appraisal, the court held, only after making an honest and objective effort to read the valuation, understand it, and question the assumptions on which it rests (Donovan v. Cunningham 1983). From that decision and the 1988 proposal grew the two part test that defined ESOP litigation for a generation. Adequate consideration had to reflect the stock’s fair market value, and it had to be the product of a determination made in good faith (Brundle v. Wilmington Trust, N.A. 2019). The Fourth Circuit in Brundle was explicit that a trustee must satisfy both parts, and it affirmed liability against an institutional trustee that had relied on a contemporaneous appraisal without adequately probing a control premium, management projections and a rounding convention (Brundle v. Wilmington Trust, N.A. 2019). The Fifth Circuit reached a similar result in Perez v. Bruister, and the Seventh and Ninth Circuits had earlier mapped the same terrain in Keach v. U.S. Trust Co. and Howard v. Shay (Perez v. Bruister 2016; Keach v. U.S. Trust Co. 2005; Howard v. Shay 1996).

What the courts began, the Department pursued through enforcement. ESOPs were designated a national enforcement project from 2005, and the Department’s preferred instrument became the consent settlement rather than the rule. The 2014 settlement with GreatBanc Trust Company produced a “Fiduciary Process Agreement” that, though binding on one trustee and of no precedential value, became a de facto practice standard for the industry because sponsors and their counsel demanded it (Perez v. GreatBanc Trust Co. 2014). A National Center for Employee Ownership review counted some 470 ESOP cases between 1990 and mid 2025, and the Department’s own amicus practice, including its brief in Brundle, made clear that it viewed deference to an appraiser as itself a breach (National Center for Employee Ownership 2018; Bloomberg Tax 2026).

Congress intervened twice. Section 346 of the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 directed the Secretary to issue acceptable standards and procedures for establishing good faith fair market value for shares to be acquired by an ESOP (SECURE 2.0 Act 2022). The Department responded on January 16, 2025, with a proposed regulation and safe harbor that the ESOP community regarded as setting bars higher than existing case law, and the proposal was frozen four days later under the incoming administration’s regulatory freeze order and subsequently withdrawn (Department of Labor 2025). Then, on April 14, 2026, the Employee Benefits Security Administration issued Field Assistance Bulletin 2026-01. The Bulletin commits the agency not to regulate through enforcement and directs that, until it complies with the SECURE 2.0 directive, all pending and proposed ESOP valuation investigations be reviewed against a guiding principle of fairness (Employee Benefits Security Administration 2026). Read together, the withdrawn proposal and the Bulletin signaled that the Department had stepped back from the field. The Act is Congress stepping into it.

What the Act Does

The operative text is short enough to quote in full. New section 3(18)(B)(i) provides that, for purposes of the fair market value clause, “a fiduciary of an employee stock ownership plan (as defined in section 407(d)(6)) may make a good faith reliance on a valuation provided by an independent valuation expert or business appraiser that has relied upon the principles and methodologies set forth in Internal Revenue Service Revenue Ruling 59-60 (as amplified and modified by the Internal Revenue Service from time to time) in determining the fair market value of an asset described in such clause” (Retire Through Ownership Act 2026, § 2(a)). Clause (ii) then supplies three rules of construction. The provision does not preclude the Secretary from promulgating an interpretive regulation under the Administrative Procedure Act; it does not expand the Secretary’s authority over the term beyond what existed the day before enactment; and it does not modify a fiduciary’s obligations under section 404. The amendment applies to determinations made on or after October 15, 2026 (Retire Through Ownership Act 2026, § 2(b)).

Three features of this drafting deserve attention. The first is the object of reliance. The introduced bill would have let the fiduciary rely on the principles of Revenue Ruling 59-60 directly; the enacted text, following the Senate committee substitute, makes the object of reliance a valuation produced by an independent expert who has in turn relied on those principles (Marshall 2025; Retire Through Ownership Act 2026). The independence of the appraiser and the appraiser’s actual adherence to the Ruling are therefore conditions of the statutory reliance, not ornaments to it.

The second is the collapse of the two part test to a single standard. The pre-amendment language was read by the Department and by several circuits to require both good faith and a price that was in fact within a reasonable range of fair market value. The amended text makes good faith reliance on a conforming appraisal the operative inquiry. A fiduciary who has relied in good faith has satisfied the definition even if a later expert, with hindsight and a different discount rate, can construct a lower number. This is the change that matters to anyone pricing the risk of ESOP fiduciaries.

The third is the incorporation by reference of a 1959 tax ruling. Revenue Ruling 59-60 defines fair market value as the price at which property would change hands between a hypothetical willing buyer and willing seller, neither under compulsion and both reasonably informed, and it lists eight non-exclusive factors: the nature and history of the business, the economic and industry outlook, book value and financial condition, earning capacity, dividend paying capacity, goodwill and other intangibles, prior sales and the size of the block, and the market prices of comparable publicly traded companies (Internal Revenue Service 1959). The Ruling cautions that no general formula exists, that the factors cannot be assigned mathematical weights, and that earnings will dominate for operating companies while asset values will dominate for holding companies. The Department’s own 1988 proposal drew its valuation factors from the same source, so an eventual interpretive regulation would not start from a blank page (Department of Labor 1988). Importantly for what follows, the Ruling is a methodology for appraisers. It says nothing about how a fiduciary must engage with the appraisal it produces, and that silence is where section 404 continues to operate.

Two Coverages, Two Risks

ERISA addresses the integrity of plan assets through two entirely different instruments, and the Act speaks to only one of them. Section 412 requires every fiduciary and every person who handles funds or other property of a plan to be bonded against loss by reason of fraud or dishonesty, directly or through connivance with others (29 U.S.C. § 1112(a); 29 C.F.R. § 2580.412-6). The Department’s guidance describes the covered perils as larceny, theft, embezzlement, forgery, misappropriation, wrongful abstraction, wrongful conversion, willful misapplication and other acts of a dishonest character (Employee Benefits Security Administration 2008, Q1). The bond is a first party instrument: the plan is the insured, the surety is the obligor, and the covered persons are the plan officials whose dishonesty would cause the loss. It is not liability insurance, and the Department has said so in as many words (Employee Benefits Security Administration 2008, Q2).

The fiduciary’s exposure for a bad ESOP transaction arises elsewhere. Section 409 makes a fiduciary personally liable to make good to the plan any losses resulting from a breach of the duties imposed by Part 4 of Title I, and section 502(a)(2) gives participants and the Secretary a cause of action to enforce that liability (29 U.S.C. §§ 1109, 1132(a)(2)). An ESOP that overpays for employer stock has suffered a loss, but the loss is the product of imprudence or disloyalty, not of theft. Every reported adequate consideration case, from Cunningham through Brundle, has been pleaded and decided as a fiduciary breach claim. None has been a fidelity bond claim, and none could have been. Section 410 permits the fiduciary to purchase insurance against that liability, and the fiduciary liability policy is the market’s response to it (29 U.S.C. § 1110(b)).

The appraiser’s position confirms the point from the other direction. Section 412 reaches persons who handle plan funds or property, and the Department’s regulations define handling by reference to physical contact, custody, disbursement authority, signatory power and the power to direct transfers (29 C.F.R. § 2580.412-6). An independent valuation firm has none of these. It renders an opinion and sends an invoice. Its negligence, or even its dishonesty, is not a bond loss unless some covered plan official conspired with it, and in that event the covered peril is the official’s connivance, not the appraisal. The Act’s conferral of statutory reliance on that appraisal therefore operates entirely within the fiduciary liability domain. It changes what a trustee must prove to defeat a section 409 claim; it changes nothing about what a plan must prove to recover under its ESOP ERISA bond.

This distinction is sometimes blurred in the marketplace because both products are sold to the same plan sponsor, often by the same broker, and because sponsors who have just been told that the ESOP ERISA bond is “required by ERISA” assume it must cover the thing they are most worried about. It does not, and the Act is a useful occasion to say so. A plan that needs protection against trustee error needs a fiduciary liability policy. A plan that needs protection against trustee theft needs the bond. The law has just made the first of those risks cheaper to bear. It has not touched the second.

Why the ESOP ERISA Bond Is Structurally Unaffected

Every mechanical feature of the ESOP ERISA bond derives from section 412 and the regulations at 29 C.F.R. Part 2580, and none of those provisions is cross referenced by, or dependent upon, the definition of adequate consideration. The bond amount is fixed at not less than ten percent of the funds handled in the preceding plan year, subject to a floor of $1,000 and a ceiling of $500,000 per plan, raised to $1mn for plans that hold employer securities by section 622 of the Pension Protection Act of 2006 (29 U.S.C. § 1112(a); Pension Protection Act 2006). The Department has clarified that the $1mn ceiling does not apply where employer securities are held only through a broadly diversified pooled vehicle such as a mutual fund, but an ESOP by definition invests primarily in employer securities held directly, so the higher ceiling governs every plan the Act addresses (Employee Benefits Security Administration 2008, Q16). The bond must be written by a surety named in Treasury Department Circular 570, may carry no deductible as to the ERISA mandated amount, must name the plan as insured, and must permit the plan or its representative to make claim (29 C.F.R. §§ 2580.412-11, 2580.412-18, 2580.412-21). Each of these requirements stands exactly as it stood on October 14.

The one place where valuation touches the bond is the computation of funds handled. The ten percent figure is derived from plan assets at the beginning of the year, and for an ESOP those assets consist overwhelmingly of employer stock carried at the most recent appraised value. A valuation regime that produces higher or lower appraisals would in principle move the computed amount. In practice the effect is nil for most of the market. A leveraged ESOP that runs loan proceeds through the trust to acquire a block of stock is at the $1mn ceiling from the first year, and most mature ESOPs of any size are there as well. The Act does not alter the arithmetic, and the arithmetic rarely matters.

The fraud scenario deserves separate treatment because it is the only one in which a valuation can become a bond claim. Suppose selling shareholders who also serve as plan committee members procure an inflated appraisal through false projections or undisclosed side arrangements, and the plan overpays them. That is dishonesty by covered plan officials causing loss to the plan, and the ESOP ERISA bond responds as it always has. The Act does nothing to this exposure. Good faith reliance is by definition unavailable to a fiduciary who has manufactured the inputs to the appraisal, and the statute’s requirement of an independent expert excludes the captive valuator from the reliance it confers. The surety’s underwriting of the dishonesty risk inside an ESOP is unchanged in scope and unchanged in severity. Whether a more permissive enforcement climate invites more aggressive transaction structuring is a fair question, but aggressive structuring by honest fiduciaries is a fiduciary liability exposure, not a fidelity one, and the bond’s trigger remains fraud or dishonesty.

It bears emphasis that the Act also does not reach the ancillary coverages that often travel with an ESOP ERISA bond. The faithful performance rider, where a plan elects to purchase it, responds to failure to perform duties faithfully rather than to dishonesty, but it is an optional extension beyond the section 412 mandate and remains subject to the carrier’s own terms. The computer crime and funds transfer fraud extensions respond to third party intrusion. None of these is implicated by a statute whose sole subject is how a fiduciary may establish the fair market value of closely held stock.

Where the Act Matters to Surety Underwriters

If the terms of the ESOP ERISA bond do not change, the market for it does. The National Center for Employee Ownership counts 6,609 ESOPs covering 15.1mn participants and holding more than $2.1 trillion in assets as of its January 2026 update, and it notes that the number of plans has declined since the turn of the century even as participation has grown (National Center for Employee Ownership 2026). The ESOP Association has described adequate consideration, and the liability that attends it, as the single greatest hindrance to ESOP adoption (ESOP Association 2026). The Act exists to remove that hindrance. The Senate passed it by unanimous consent and the House by a vote of 401 to 14, and the sponsor’s stated purpose was to make the formation of new ESOPs easier and the operation of existing ones less burdensome (Marshall 2025; Investment News 2026).

The mechanism by which this produces bond demand is worth spelling out. ESOP formation has been constrained less by the appetite of selling shareholders than by the willingness of institutional trustees to take the transaction. Several trustees exited or curtailed the business after Bruister and Brundle, and those who remained priced their fees and their insurance to a litigation environment in which an appraisal could be second guessed years later by an expert hired for the purpose. The Act gives those trustees a statutory reliance defense for the first time. Trustee capacity, which has been the bottleneck, should expand. Every transaction that capacity enables creates a plan subject to section 412, at the $1mn ceiling, with a bond that must be in place before plan officials handle the first dollar of loan proceeds or contributions.

The surety’s response to that volume should be disciplined about what actually drives loss. The ESOP ERISA bond pays when a covered person steals, and the underwriting questionnaire should therefore interrogate the persons and the money, not the appraisal. The questions that matter are who handles participant distributions and under what dual control; how repurchase obligation cash is funded, segregated and reconciled; who services the internal and external loan in a leveraged structure and whether the same individual both authorizes and records payments; whether the employer stock itself is held by an independent custodian or sits in a desk drawer; whether the trustee is an institutional fiduciary with its own controls and financial institution bond or an internal committee of officers who are also selling shareholders; and how often an independent party reconciles the trust’s cash and share ledgers against the recordkeeper. An ESOP with an internal trustee, a repurchase obligation funded from operating cash on an ad hoc basis and no outside custodian is a materially different fidelity risk from one administered by a national trust company, and the questionnaire should be built to tell them apart.

What the questionnaire should not do is import the valuation inquiry. The surety has no business asking whether the appraiser applied a control premium or how the discount for lack of marketability was derived, because the answers bear on a loss the bond does not cover. The temptation to ask will be strongest precisely because the Act has made valuation the topic of the moment. Resist it. The appraisal is the fiduciary liability underwriter’s exhibit.

That said, the Act is the best occasion in years for the surety to raise fiduciary liability with the sponsor. Section 412 makes the bond compulsory and makes the sponsor a captive audience. The sponsor who has just been told that the bond does not respond to a valuation claim, and that Congress has just reduced the severity of such claims, is ready to hear that fiduciary liability coverage exists, that it is where the trustee’s personal exposure under section 409 is actually insured, and that its pricing has just become more favorable. A surety that places the compulsory product and refers the elective one has served the plan properly. A surety that places the compulsory product and lets the sponsor believe it has addressed the fiduciary exposure has not.

The Section 404 Caveat

The rule of construction in new section 3(18)(B)(ii)(III) is the provision most likely to be overlooked by sponsors and most likely to be litigated by everyone else. By preserving the fiduciary’s obligations under section 404 in full, Congress left intact the duty of prudence, the duty of loyalty and the duty to act for the exclusive purpose of providing benefits (29 U.S.C. § 1104(a)(1)). Those duties, not the definition of adequate consideration, were the actual basis of liability in the leading cases. The Fourth Circuit in Brundle framed the adequate consideration inquiry as resting on the conduct of the fiduciary judged by the prudent man standard, and it found that the trustee’s reliance on the appraisal was not reasonably justified because the trustee had not asked the questions a prudent fiduciary would have asked (Brundle v. Wilmington Trust, N.A. 2019). Nothing in the Act forbids a court from asking those same questions tomorrow.

The predictable consequence is that valuation litigation will be re-pleaded as process litigation. The theories are already written. A trustee may be charged with failing to vet the appraiser’s independence, qualifications or prior relationships with the seller; with accepting management projections without testing them against historical performance or industry data; with failing to notice internal inconsistencies in the report; with paying a control premium where the plan did not acquire control in fact; with permitting a conflicted committee to drive the process; or with failing to negotiate at all. Each of these was pleaded in Brundle, Bruister or Cunningham, and each sounds in section 404 rather than section 3(18). The Act’s reliance standard assists the trustee who did these things and relied anyway, because the new text asks whether the reliance was in good faith rather than whether the price was right. It does not assist the trustee who did none of them, because good faith reliance presupposes a process on which reliance is reasonable.

The statutory requirement that the appraiser be independent and have actually relied on Revenue Ruling 59-60 supplies two further points of attack. Plaintiffs will litigate independence where the valuation firm has a continuing engagement with the sponsor or a fee structure tied to the deal closing, and they will litigate adherence where the report departs from the Ruling’s factors or applies them in a manner the Ruling itself disclaims. The Ruling’s instruction that no mathematical weighting of its factors is permissible is a particularly convenient hook for an expert retained to find that a report mechanically averaged its approaches (Internal Revenue Service 1959). The Department, for its part, retains explicit authority to issue an interpretive regulation and may eventually define what reliance in good faith requires in procedural terms. Until it does, courts will define it case by case.

For the fiduciary liability market, the net effect is a reduction in severity more than frequency. The reasonable range theory, under which a trustee could be liable for a price that a court later found to exceed fair market value even where the process was defensible, is gone for determinations made on or after October 15, 2026. Damages models built on the difference between the price paid and a litigation expert’s reconstruction will face a threshold defense they did not face before. But the process claims survive, the Department’s enforcement discretion survives, and transactions closed before the effective date are governed by the old test. Underwriters of fiduciary liability coverage for ESOP trustees should expect pricing to improve, not collapse.

For the surety, the lesson is one of candor. The ESOP ERISA bond does not respond to any of this, and the Act does not end any of it. The broker who presents the Act as a safe harbor, or who allows the sponsor to infer that the bond and the statute between them have retired the trustee’s exposure, has oversold both. The accurate message is narrower and more useful: the compulsory bond covers dishonesty and is unchanged; the elective fiduciary liability coverage covers error and has just become more worth buying; and the trustee who wants the benefit of the new reliance standard must still run a process that a court will recognize as good faith.

In Summation

The Retire Through Ownership Act is a narrow statute with broad consequences for one market and none for another. It gives ESOP fiduciaries a statutory basis for relying in good faith on an independent appraisal grounded in Revenue Ruling 59-60, it displaces the judicially constructed requirement that the price also fall within a reasonable range of fair market value, and it does so against a backdrop in which the Department of Labor had already signaled, in Field Assistance Bulletin 2026-01, that it would not pursue valuation theories through enforcement until it had issued the standards Congress asked for. For trustees, sponsors and the fiduciary liability carriers that insure them, the Act is the most significant development since the 1988 proposal it effectively replaces.

For the ESOP ERISA bond, the Act changes nothing in the instrument and a good deal in the environment. Section 412 still requires the bond; the regulations at Part 2580 still fix its amount, its form and its surety; the $1mn ceiling for plans holding employer securities still applies; and the covered peril remains fraud or dishonesty by those who handle plan assets. What the Act does is remove the principal deterrent to ESOP formation and restore trustee capacity, which means more plans, more qualifying bonds and more sponsors who need to understand the difference between the coverage ERISA compels and the coverage it merely permits. The surety that writes the former should be the one that explains the latter.

Surety One, Inc. writes ESOP fidelity bonds and all other section 412 compliant coverage through ERISA-Bonds.com, and places fiduciary liability coverage for plan sponsors, trustees and committee members through FiduciaryLiabilityCoverage.com. A plan that holds employer securities needs both, and after October 15, 2026, the second has become easier to justify to a board. Our underwriters and ERISA experts are available to discuss an existing ESOP or one in formation.

~ C. Constantin Poindexter, MA, JD, CPCU, AFSB, ASLI, ARe, AINS, AIS, CPLP

References

• Bloomberg Tax. 2026. “New ESOP Law Poised to Curb Litigation, Spark Ownership Boon.” Bloomberg Tax, September 2026. https://news.bloombergtax.com/in-house-counsel/new-esop-law-poised-to-curb-litigation-spark-ownership-boon
• Brundle v. Wilmington Trust, N.A., 919 F.3d 763 (4th Cir. 2019). https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/Opinions/171873.P.pdf
• Department of Labor. 1988. Proposed Regulation Relating to the Definition of Adequate Consideration, 53 Fed. Reg. 17632 (May 17, 1988).
• Department of Labor. 2025. Proposed Regulation Defining Adequate Consideration and Proposed Class Exemption for Certain ESOP Transactions (approved January 16, 2025; withdrawn following Executive Order of January 20, 2025, Regulatory Freeze Pending Review).
• Donovan v. Cunningham, 716 F.2d 1455 (5th Cir. 1983).
• Employee Benefits Security Administration. 2008. Field Assistance Bulletin No. 2008-04, Guidance Regarding ERISA Fidelity Bonding Requirements (November 25, 2008). https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ebsa/employers-and-advisers/guidance/field-assistance-bulletins/2008-04
• Employee Benefits Security Administration. 2026. Field Assistance Bulletin No. 2026-01, Guiding Principles for EBSA Enforcement Priorities (April 14, 2026). https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ebsa/employers-and-advisers/guidance/field-assistance-bulletins/2026-01
• Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974, 29 U.S.C. §§ 1002(18), 1104, 1107(d)(6), 1108(e), 1109, 1110, 1112, 1132(a)(2).
• ESOP Association. 2026. “House Passes Landmark Retire Through Ownership Act with Strong Bipartisan Majority.” Press release, September 16, 2026. https://secure.businesswire.com/news/home/20260916886257/en/House-Passes-Landmark-Retire-Through-Ownership-Act-with-Strong-Bipartisan-Majority
• Howard v. Shay, 100 F.3d 1484 (9th Cir. 1996).
• Internal Revenue Service. 1959. Revenue Ruling 59-60, 1959-1 C.B. 237.
• Investment News. 2026. “Bipartisan Bill Clarifying ESOP Stock Rules Sails Through House.” September 17, 2026. https://www.investmentnews.com/retirement-planning/bipartisan-bill-clarifying-esop-stock-rules-sails-through-house/268243
• Keach v. U.S. Trust Co., 419 F.3d 626 (7th Cir. 2005).
• Marshall, Roger. 2025. “Senator Marshall Applauds Senate Passage of His Legislation to Strengthen Employee Ownership in America.” Press release, October 2025. https://www.marshall.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/senator-marshall-applauds-senate-passage-of-his-legislation-to-strengthen-employee-ownership-in-america
• National Center for Employee Ownership. 2018. “DOL and ASA File Briefs in ESOP Valuation Case.” https://nceo.org/blog/dol-and-asa-file-briefs-esop-valuation-case
• National Center for Employee Ownership. 2026. “ESOPs by the Numbers.” Updated January 2026. https://www.nceo.org/articles/esops-by-the-numbers
• Pension Protection Act of 2006, Pub. L. No. 109-280, § 622, 120 Stat. 780.
• Perez v. Bruister, 823 F.3d 250 (5th Cir. 2016).
• Perez v. GreatBanc Trust Co., No. 5:12-cv-01648 (C.D. Cal.), Settlement Agreement and Fiduciary Process Agreement (June 2, 2014).
• Retire Through Ownership Act, S. 2403, 119th Cong. (enacted October 15, 2026). Engrossed text: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-119s2403es/html/BILLS-119s2403es.htm
• SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022, Pub. L. No. 117-328, Div. T, § 346, 136 Stat. 5275.
• United States Department of Labor Regulations, 29 C.F.R. Part 2580 (Temporary Bonding Rules), §§ 2580.412-6, 2580.412-11, 2580.412-18, 2580.412-21.