In Perfection Bakeries Inc. v. Retail Wholesale & Dep't Store Int'l Union & Indus. Pension Fund, No. 23-12533, 147 F.4th 1314 (11th Cir. Aug. 1, 2025), the Eleventh Circuit affirmed that an employer's credit for a prior partial withdrawal from a multiemployer pension plan must be applied at the second step of the four-step statutory process for calculating withdrawal liability. As discussed in our previous post, courts are split on the order in which the credit applies. The PBGC and a district court in Illinois have concluded that the credit should be applied at the last step of the process, while the Ninth and now the Eleventh Circuits have held that it should be applied at the second step.
In the Eleventh Circuit case, the employer partially withdrew from the plan in 2016 and was assessed $2,228,268 in partial withdrawal liability. When the employer completely withdrew two years later, the plan assessed it with $6,318,741 in complete withdrawal liability. In calculating that amount, the plan applied the credit for the prior partial withdrawal liability at the second step of the statutory waterfall. The employer commenced arbitration to challenge the calculation, arguing that the plan should have applied the credit at the end of the statutory waterfall, which would have reduced its complete withdrawal liability by roughly $2 million. The arbitrator rejected the employer's challenge and ruled in the plan's favor, and the district court and Eleventh Circuit...
When examiners don’t get veterans’ records, bad decisions aren’t a mistake—they’re a systemic failure. In a blistering oversight hearing this week, members of Congress openly questioned whether th...