Committee on Investment of Employee Benefit Assets.

• Position: Financial Executives Institute committee

You could say a committee's work is never done. That's especially true for FEI's Committee on Investment of Employee Benefit Assets, which is actively working to channel the changing policy winds on retirement income policy to enhance benefit security for plan participants. CIEBA members represent 150 corporate pension plan sponsors that collectively have fiduciary responsibility for more than $900 billion in pension plan assets.

"Our purpose is twofold," explains Myra Drucker, assistant treasurer at Xerox Corp. in Stamford, Conn., and 1995-96 committee chairman. "We're here to provide a forum for corporate plan sponsors on fiduciary and investment issues, and we address policy issues that will affect companies' ability to offer retirement plans." CIEBA aims to proactively demonstrate the vitality and success of the private retirement system to legislators, regulators and the public, so the occasional problem or abuse doesn't taint the entire system, she explains.

The committee's stance, says Jim Bayne, manager of benefits finance and investment at Exxon in Irving, Tex., and the 1997-98 chairman, is that Congress should preserve employer flexibility in designing defined-benefit and defined-contribution plans and avoid legislating mandates that stifle an important source of national savings and retirement security. To these ends, CIEBA spent three years working with the Department of Labor "to provide a bright-line test to distinguish investment information and education from investment advice in defined-contribution plans," Bayne notes. As a result, the department issued guidelines that gave companies more flexibility in providing investment information and education to their employees. "Judging from the response CIEBA's received from the broad FEI membership, we really filled a need," he reports.

On a different note, Drucker points out, "As retirement assets grow, more companies may decide to manage them internally." That's why the committee also sought and obtained an investment-adviser exemption for in-house plan administrators that removed unnecessary red tape and preserved administrative flexibility for companies with internal asset managers.

The committee successfully...