US Department of Labor Issues Guidance on Certain Aspects of Global Investment Pooling: Another Step Towards Global Pensions?

The economy is increasingly global, and multinational companies have been devoting more attention to cross-border pension arrangements. The “Holy Grail” of global pensions remains the cross-border pension plan for employees in multiple countries. While that remains elusive, progress is being made in small steps, one of the first from a US perspective being pooling of pension investments of plans in multiple countries for the administrative, cost and investment advantages that such pooling can provide. While there remain complicated issues, the Department of Labor (DOL) has issued an opinion on one of the issues that arises for global pooling arrangements under the US pension law, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).