Worldwide practical evidence and a wide range of academic research support the view that a proper legal environment and the provision of suitable fiscal incentives are indispensable prerequisites for any policy truly aiming the development of employee share ownership. Experts and organizations worldwide are invited to react.

Corey Rosen, Founder, National Center for Employee Ownership (USA)
(The NCEO is a nonprofit membership and research organization that was founded in 1981 to provide most objective and reliable information on broad-based employee ownership. It is widely considered the leading source of information on employee ownership in the U.S. and worldwide.)

Here are my comments. Good luck with your efforts.

Are Tax Incentives Necessary for Broad Employee Ownership?

The report Employee’s Financial Participation in Companies’ Policies argues that fiscal incentives (both tax and non-tax) appear to be related to the wider adoption of employee ownership plans, but may not be a prerequisite for these plans. It is inarguable that they are not a prerequisite — companies may set up plans even without any incentives out of a philosophical commitment to the idea. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Mondragon Group in Spain. Based on our work over the past 33 years studying employee ownership in the U.S. and in other countries, however, it is clear that for employee ownership to play a substantial role in the economy, tax incentives are very much needed.

Different Modes of Employee Ownership and Their Impact on Employees and Companies

Before answering the question of the importance of fiscal incentives, we need to look at what kind of employee ownership countries want to encourage and what the consequences of different forms of ownership are.

In Europe, the most common form of employee ownership is the employee purchase plan in publicly traded companies. These plans often offer some discount and many countries provide some form of tax incentive to the employee.  Employees hold shares individually for varying amounts of time. These plans typically result in small percentages of ownership (5% or less) held by employees and, most often, less than a majority of employees buying shares, especially lower income employees. There is no research to indicate that these companies show improved financial performance as a result of employee ownership. The research on employee ownership in the U.S., where employee ownership is most prevalent, shows that employee ownership improves performance only when employees own a more substantial share of the company, ownership is broadly distributed, and companies have cultures of high information sharing and shared participation in decisions. Providing incentives for employee share purchases may be useful to improve employee financial well being, however.

In France and the United Kingdom, and especially the U.S., there are also plans that hold shares collectively for employees in some kind of trust. The employees usually do not get the stock until after they leave. The plans tend to be broadly inclusive and are funded by the employer not the employee. These plans have a much higher potential for effecting corporate performance and tend to have a much larger impact on employee asset accumulation. In the typical U.S. ESOP, for instance, plans own at least 30% and often 100% of the company, companies contribute 6% to 8% of pay per year to the plan (this is not in lieu of, but in addition to pay) or more, and employees end up with about 2.5 times the retirement assets on companies without employee ownership. These companies also grow about 2.5% per year faster and lay people off at one-third to one-fourth the rate of non-ESOP companies.

The difficulty with the typical models that do not have some kind of share pooling mechanism, such as an ESOP trust in the U.S., is that relying on employees to purchase shares, even if they are getting a match or a discount, almost always means that:

·  A majority of eligible employees will usually not participate even when there are incentives. Studies consistently show that people tend to overvalue current income versus future rewards and overvalue risk. Employees often live "paycheck to paycheck," making participation in a share purchase plan challenging. 

·  Among those who do participate, the amounts set aside will be skewed towards those higher paid employees with more disposable income.

·  Participants will usually sell their shares when they can. While they may also buy new shares, their holdings will not aggregate over time, as they do in a trust where the shares are usually accumulated until departure. This approach gives people a much larger stake as owners.

·  Employees, as a group, will always be minority owners, usually 10% or less. That creates far fewer incentives for managers to set up extensive employee ownership culture models, as would be the case where employee ownership is long-term and substantial. Yet we know that employee ownership only produces substantial performance improvements when combined with cultures that stress employee involvement in day-to-day work decisions.

What Kinds of Fiscal Incentives Make Sense?

Because of all this, we believe that countries that want sustained, substantial, and broad employee ownership in companies need to provide ways that the ownership is not based on employees making decisions to use current income to buy shares, but rather on company contributions with tax benefits for the companies and/or sellers to employee ownership plans doing this. The ownership plan also needs to pool ownership and allocate shares to individual employees during their tenure with the firm.

These tax incentives should be both at the corporate and individual level.  Because the most equitable and deep plans are necessarily company funded, owners need incentives to set them up. This is especially true for closely held companies where the goal is to use a company-funded employee ownership plan to buy out the owners. Absent tax incentives, owners will sell to someone else. There were virtually no plans like this in the U.S. until tax incentives for ESOPs were created. Now there are over 7,000 ESOPs, mostly used for this purpose, employing millions of people. ESOP tax incentives amount to only about $2 billion/year, but, based on a National Center for Employee Ownership analysis, save over $8 billion per year in federal unemployment costs alone (because ESOP companies pay people off so much less often). By contrast, states spend over $80 billion in tax incentives to encourage companies to move from one place to another with no net job gain. The U.K. is now moving to create a very similar structure with similar tax benefits.

It is also important that U.S. and U.K. that while the incentives focus on the employer, contributions do not trigger any current taxation on employees. Tax is deferred until income is realized. Doing anything else makes employee ownership more punitive than rewarding, at least in the short-term.

In public companies, tax incentives can encourage contributions as well. But the economic and political reality is that shareholders and often governments are reluctant to shoulder the costs of significant annual company contributions for shares. Employee purchase models are a much easier sell. While these models are imperfect for the reasons we have stated, absent incentives for employees to help offset their risk aversion and current income preference, employee ownership will necessarily be a limited phenomenon except in certain idiosyncratic companies with very strong ownership cultures. In the U.S, employee stock purchase plans typically offer employees an essentially guaranteed 5% to 15% annual return, and often more, with no risk but rates of participation in these plans, which require setting aside money on a regular basis out of salaries, are still only about one-third the work force.

If governments want to encourage broader and deeper employee ownership plans in these countries, they should consider tax benefits to the employer for setting up plans that involve most or all employees meeting certain eligibility requirements. The special tax incentives would only become effective if a certain number of employees participated.

A more aggressive approach might provide incentives for plans such as that at Schneider Electric, which has a very high-take up rate. Employees can borrow money to buy shares. The loans come from a bank, but the arrangements were made by the company, but they are non-recourse to employees if the stock does not increase enough to repay the loan. For each share an employee buys, nine more are purchased on the employee's behalf. At the end of the plan's holding period, the employee receives shares having a value equal to the original share purchased plus an amount equal to 5.5 times the increase in value (if any) of that share. Thus, for the price of one share, the employee receives the value of that share plus 55% of the gain (if any) on all ten shares. The bank receives the remainder of the gain. This gives the employee the chance to make a substantial gain with a relatively small risk, since the bank does not have recourse to the employees. The lender hedges its risk through buying puts and calls on Schneider stock.

Conclusion

Fiscal incentive policies need to be crafted with a view towards what role a country hopes employee ownership will play. If the goal is to provide employees, mostly in listed firms, with a tax-favored way to accumulate assets, then tax incentives for employees to offset their risk aversion and time preference may be enough. But if the goal is to make employee ownership another model for corporate organization, then fiscal policy needs to provide substantial incentives to employers and deferred taxation for employees. The research in the U.S. and U.K. have shown clearly that the benefits are worth the cost. For a detailed review of U/S. research, see the article Research on Employee Ownership, Corporate Performance, and Employee Communication on the web site of the National Center for Employee Ownership.