Political returns: Washington wants to manage your 401 account - k - Columns

Reason, April, 2002 by Michael W. Lynch

ENRON OFFICIALLY BECAME the winter's leading media circus when Jesse Jackson, the nation's pre-eminent itinerant clown, arrived to pray with Enron's fallen CEO, Kenneth Lay, and to rally former employees. The Enron show could have been custom-choreographed for Washington: A large company, run by dishonest and greedy men, exploited weak employees. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) played to his home crowd in The Boston Globe. "As Enron stock fell from a high of over $90 to less than $I a share, the company prevented workers from selling at every turn," he wrote. "As a matter of policy, Enron did not allow employees under 50 to sell the Enron stock from their 401(k) retirement plans."

Crossfire co-host Bill Press was even more over the top. "The human impact is staggering;" he declared in a syndicated column. "Some 4,500 employees out of work. Tens of thousands of investors watched their Enron stock sink suddenly from $83 per share to 26 cents, wiping out $6o billion in stockholder value. And those 11,000 employees whose 401(k) funds were invested exclusively in Enron--and who were forbidden by Enron's own rules from diversifying--today have no retirement plan at all."

Those wronged employees and retirees are not hard to find. Fortune introduced 61-year-old Marie Thibaut, an Enron administrative assistant for 15 year. At one point, her 401(k) was worth nearly $500,000. Today it's valued at $22,000, and she has shelved plans for early retirement.

Bill Quinlan, who called it quits eight years back, appeared in The Washington Post. He kept his entire retirement portfolio invested in Enron stock. At its peak, his portfolio approached $1 million. It's not worth much today.

Tom Padgett, a 59-year-old lab analyst, showed up in the pages of USA Today and elsewhere. When he checked his 401(k) in 2000, it was worth $615,000. Today it's down to $10,000. He too replaced plans to retire with plans for another decade of work.

These stories, along with his mother-in-law's

$8,000 loss, have touched President Bush. "Employees who have worked hard and saved all of their lives should not have to risk losing everything if their company fails;" he declared in his State of the Union speech. Two days later he proposed new regulations for 401(k) plans.

Wipe your eyes, and keep the call for more federal controls in your throat. As usual, much is missing from this story.

Nothing in the Kennedy or Press quotes about Enron's 401(k) plan is accurate. It's not true that 11,000 employees were invested exclusively in Enron stock, and those who were chose that option. They certainly weren't forbidden to diversify. And they all still have a retirement plan, since 401(k) plans live on after companies die. Bush is right: Nobody should be forced to risk losing everything if the company he works for crashes. And nobody was.

Enron maintained a rather typical 401(k) plan for a company of its size. It offered 20 investment options, its own stock being one. It matched 50 percent of employee contributions--up to 6 percent of a salary--with Enron stock. Workers couldn't sell shares their employer gave them until they turned 50, a common restriction for gifted stock. They were not prohibited from selling stock they purchased. At the end of 2000,62 percent of the value of employee 401(k) accounts was held in Enron stock. (This is risky but not unique. Procter & Gamble's fund is 95 percent company stock, Abbott Laboratories' is 90 percent, Pfizer's is 86 percent, and Coca-Cola's is 82 percent.)

In early 2001 Enron decided to contract out its 401(k) administration to an outside company. The transfer required a freezing of accounts, which took place over II trading days, from October 29 through November 12. Enron's stock was at $13.81 when it froze the accounts. By the time 401(k) investors could sell again, the stock was at $9.98.

Notice that the stock didn't "sink suddenly," as Press claims, from $83 to 26 cents. It experienced a long, well-deserved slide over a period of many months. The restrictions on selling the gifted Enron stock didn't apply to Padgett, Quinlan, or Thibaut, except for the II-day freeze. "My children told me I should diversify," Thibaut told Fortune. "But all the mutual funds were going down, and I just kept going up."

"I've had some good advice," Quinlan said in the Post. "They told me [to diversify]. If I would have taken it...I would have been drawing good now."

These pesky details haven't kept Washington from its favorite sport: leveraging a disaster to push for more regulation. Some, like House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), who called for creating a "universal pension system" in his response to Bush's State of the Union address, are just blowing wind. (Pressed for details, a Gephardt aid replies, "That was just rhetoric for the speech.")

Others have put their plans on paper. Sens.Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) want to restrict the amount of one company's stock in a 401(k) plan to 20 percent, slash the tax break that companies get for matching contributions with in-house stock, and dictate that any gifted stock could be sold after 90 days. President Bush would make companies responsible for the value of the 401(k) plans during freezes, force plans to allow participants to sell company stock after three years, and allow companies to give financial advice to 401(k) participants.