Larry M. Sewell - Lawyer in St. Louis, MO

Larry Sewell started as a general tax lawyer with a major St. Louis law firm upon his graduation from the Masters of Laws in Taxation program at New York University in 1972. He was a member of that firms taxation/employee benefits practice group and, since 1975, has practiced almost exclusively in the ERISA, executive compensation and employee benefit areas. He also worked in other areas of the tax law including exempt organizations, practice before the Internal Revenue Service and corporate redemptions and reorganizations. He has extensive experience with obtaining Internal Revenue Service determination letters of qualification for retirement plans, employee benefit aspects of mergers and acquisitions, design and implementation of qualified and nonqualified retirement and deferred compensation plans and arrangements, equity compensation, public retirement systems, multiemployer plans, employee stock ownership plans, employee benefit arrangements for tax exempt and government organizations and correction of qualified plan operation and document errors through the Internal Revenue Service plan correction programs.

Experience:

• Secured Internal Revenue Service approval of the correction of a pension plan, covering over 3,000 employees, under which pension benefits earned by participants were not properly credited for seven years.
• Obtained tax qualification from the Internal Revenue Service for a significant public retirement system which had operated for over 40 years without being tax qualified.
• Successfully concluded an Internal Revenue Service audit under which a pension plan had improperly failed to timely commence payment of benefits to several thousand participants for an Internal Revenue service sanction of $70,000.
• Secured Internal Revenue Service approval on the basis of scrivener's error through its voluntary correction program, of the correction of an employer's two qualified retirement plans which improperly did not provide, for approximately 33 years, for exclusion of a category of employees.
• Secured Internal Revenue Service approval, under its closing agreement program, to prospectively correct a large defined benefit plan which, for over 30 years, permitted participants to both (i) continue working for the plan sponsor and (ii) receive early retirement benefits before the plan's normal retirement date.
• Developed a stock based, nonqualified retirement plan which enabled executives to purchase stock in their employer on a pretax basis.The employer was subsequently sold for a substantial profit.
• Designed and implemented multiple executive compensation arrangements for a major hospital system.