Michael Powers is a Partner with O’Donoghue & O’Donoghue LLP who focuses exclusively on counseling the Firm’s local, regional, and national multiemployer pension and health plan clients on compliance-related issues. In doing so, he strives to provide practical and understandable legal advice that is designed to solve routine and unusual problems in the most pragmatic way possible.
Michael joined the Firm after earning his Master of Laws in Taxation (LLM) with a Certificate in Employee Benefits Law at Georgetown University Law Center. His practice areas include plan design, drafting and administration, participant communications, reporting and disclosure requirements, fiduciary issues, contract negotiations, prohibited transactions, plan qualification rules, funding rules, ACA, HIPAA and COBRA compliance, nonqualified deferred compensation plans, voluntary employees’ beneficiary associations, health reimbursement arrangements, and the proper tax treatment of fringe benefits.
This experience has resulted in work on the implementation of complex rehabilitation plan designs developed to restore the financial health of critical status pension funds, the drafting of variable pension plan designs intended to facilitate financial stability into perpetuity, and the formation of trust fund-owned administrative corporations designed to enable Trustees to take control of plan operations in a self-administered fashion.
Michael has also handled numerous investigations initiated by the Department of Labor and the Internal Revenue Service that have been focused on, among other things, missing participants, the application of the Affordable Care Act’s prudent layperson standard for emergency service claims, and other issues that ordinarily arise during such inquiries.
Michael is responsible for the representation of multiemployer plans ranging in size from approximately $1 million to $4.5 billion. Michael has been working with these plans to navigate the flurry of legislative and regulatory activity arising since the inception of the COVID-19 pandemic, all with the objective of maintaining compliance while also supporting participants to the greatest extent possible.