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one administrator, one Trust, and a Suspense Account with some
commonality among all employers does not change the fact that
each of the employers separately had the unbridled authority to
select many of the relevant terms under which its employees would
collect benefits from the Prime Plan, that no Employee Group had
a right to any contributions, or earnings thereon, which had been
made by the employer of another Employee Group, and that a
severed employee could end up receiving less than his or her
promised benefit, even though the Prime Plan, as a whole, had
enough assets to compensate the employee for this shortage.
We reject petitioners' claim that the Prime Plan is a "10 or
more employer plan" based on the language and Congressional
purpose of subpart D and section 419A(f)(6). We interpret the
word "plan" to mean that there must be a single pool of funds for
use by the group as a whole (e.g., to pay the claims of all
participants), and we interpret the phrase "10 or more employer
plan" to mean that 10 or more employers must contribute to this
single pool. We do not interpret the statutory language to
include a program like the instant one where multiple employers
have contributed funds to an independent party to hold in
separate accounts until disbursed primarily for the benefit of
the contributing employer's employees in accordance with unique
terms established by that employer. We are unpersuaded that the
word "plan", as it appears in section 419A(f)(6), is satisfied by
Prime's attempt to aggregate multiple plans as a single plan.
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