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U.S. Senate Urged To Finish Pension Bill
By Susan Cornwell, Reuters
October 24, 2005
A business group is urging the U.S. Senate to finish a stalled pension bill this year, a lobbyist said on Monday, insisting that industry did not intend to derail the legislation by seeking changes to it.
The American Benefits Council wrote to all 100 senators last week to encourage them to complete legislation this year rewriting funding rules for traditional pensions, the council's President James Klein told Reuters.
"It is important that they keep working on it. There is still time to get it done," Klein said in a phone interview.
A Senate Republican aide said, however, that both sides on the pension legislation were pretty "dug in" and the impasse was likely to continue.
Senators representing labor as well as business interests, including Klein's Council, complained earlier this month that the proposed pension legislation was too hard on some companies, particularly those with falling credit ratings.
Ohio Republican Sen. Mike DeWine and Maryland Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulski held up the bill from reaching the Senate floor while seeking to amend it.
But the bill's bipartisan sponsors refused to make the change, and amid the disagreement, the Senate leadership took the bill off the agenda. An aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist last week said time was running out for senators to reach a deal and get the bill done this year.
Klein rejected suggestions that the last-minute business lobbying for changes in the legislation was to blame for the stalemate.
"The notion that one amendment has stopped action on the bill is one I can't agree with," he told Reuters.
While lawmakers should listen to business complaints, they should also keep negotiating on the legislation, which was needed to ensure a sound pension system, he said.
"The American Benefits Council, representing companies that either directly sponsor or provide services to retirement and health plans covering more than 100 million Americans, believes that it is critical that pension reform legislation be enacted this year," Klein wrote in the letter sent last week.
"Congress should accommodate the important changes to the legislation being urged by the employer community, whose sponsorship of retirement plans is essential to the system's survival," the letter added.
But the Senate Republican aide said there was strong pressure from the Bush administration and Senate budget "hawks" not to water down the pension bill any further.
"Both sides are pretty dug in," said the aide, who asked not to be named. "I would say it is most likely that there is no bill this year. Maybe a 20 percent chance."
Across the nation traditional "defined benefit" pensions are underfunded as a group by some $450 billion. The legislation, the product of two Senate committees, is an attempt to tighten funding rules, while shoring up the agency that insures pensions, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.
The PGBGC is $23.3 billion in deficit and could soon face billions of dollars more in claims from bankrupt companies in the auto supply and airline industries.
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