Overview
Mary Samsa and Joseph Urwitz wrote this bylined article about conflicting court decisions on whether Catholic health system pension plans qualify as church plans (which are exempt from ERISA and many IRS provisions). If there are more adverse decisions against such system plans, the authors wrote, “It is probable that the IRS and DOL will take compromise positions in prospectively getting those … plans into compliance with the Code and ERISA.” However they continued, health systems “should consider what such a proposed transition would mean for their organization to better understand not only the legal impact but the financial impact.”