Kwasha Lipton

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2100 North Central Road, Fort Lee, informally known as the Kwasha Lipton Building.

Kwasha Lipton was an employee benefits consulting firm located in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It was founded in 1944 by H. Charles "Chick" Kwasha and Maurice Lipton.

Kwasha Lipton is best known for creating a special type of defined benefit pension plan called a cash balance plan, which it designed for the employees of Bank of America in the 1980's. Kwasha Lipton implemented dozens of cash balance plans for its other clients, and these plans were ultimately adopted by various companies throughout the United States. Some employees allege that the plans discriminate against older workers in violation of federal age discrimination law because of the way in which younger and older employees earn benefits under cash balance plans. Legal challenges have generally been decided in favor of plan sponsors, however, and the plans have been approved by both the Internal Revenue Service and the Pension Protection Act of 2006.^[1]^[2]

Kwasha Lipton was acquired in 1996 by Coopers & Lybrand and became the Kwasha Lipton Group of Coopers & Lybrand. Coopers & Lybrand then merged with Price Waterhouse on July 1, 1998 to form PricewaterhouseCoopers. The Kwasha Lipton Group was combined with PricewaterhouseCoopers' other benefit consulting groups to create Unifi, which shortly thereafter was sold to Mellon Financial. Mellon combined Unifi with its Buck Consultants subsdiary to create Mellon HR Solutions, which was sold to Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) for $405 million in 2005 and renamed Buck Consultants.

Kwasha Lipton owned and occupied a famous building in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It is the first office building visible to the North after passing from New York to New Jersey across the George Washington Bridge, and it offers spectacular views of the bridge and the Manhattan skyline. The 13-story building has 139,000 square feet of office space, and was sold in July 2005 for $33.7 million. ACS remains the primary occupant leasing the building.

[edit] References

^ Davis & Harman LLP, Summary of Hybrid Plan Litigation, December 14, 2006. Available at American Benefits Council.
^ Preamble to Internal Revenue Service regulations, 26 CFR 1.401(a)(4), September 16, 1991.