Rosina B. Barker | Attorney

Top Local Lawyers

About Rosina

Rosina B. Barker is a partner in Ivins, Phillips & Barker's Executive Compensation and Benefits practice. She advises many of the largest corporations in the world on the tax and ERISA issues raised by their employee compensation plans. She devotes significant time to cash balance and other qualified plans with complex or novel designs. She is recognized as preeminent in the taxation of executive compensation, and has drafted, interpreted or negotiated stock-based plans, nonqualified deferred compensation plans, change-in-control agreements, employment agreements, severance plans, and the like. Her long stint drafting tax legislation for the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee brings Washington know-how to her practice.

Recent engagements include significant legal work for Xerox Corporation, Ford Motor Company, IBM, Fidelity Investments, Delphi Corporation, AmerisourceBergen, Milliken & Company, SABIC Innovative Plastics, Grant Thornton, and Dover Corporation.

Rosina is regarded as a trouble-shooter and problem solver who brings technical precision and a practical, business-oriented approach to clients' most intractable compensation issues. For example, she:

  • Resolved the tax and ERISA issues in an innovative voluntary workforce reduction undertaken by a multinational corporation with over 80,000 U.S. employees.
  • Devised an eleventh-hour section 409A solution when the buyer in a $5 billion acquisition demanded a comprehensive redesign of the target's severance and nonqualified pension plans.
  • Broke a last-minute logjam in a $3 billion acquisition by producing the golden parachute analysis and computations agreeable to all parties.
  • Advised on the merger of two workforces totaling 60,000 employees, ensuring that the combined entity's qualified plans complied with complex IRS rules.
  • Represented a client before PBGC and Treasury to gain approval of a pre-PPA funding strategy for a novel plan design, saving the client hundreds of millions of dollars over several years.
  • Represented a client with a unique plan structure before Congress and the IRS, to win inclusion of needed provisions in 2006 pension legislation and in IRS guidance while working with business coalition representatives and government staff.
  • Turned back an IRS challenge to a compensation deduction claimed by a large national utility by winning a 100% IRS concession on the courthouse steps.
  • Provided expert help on knotty issues affecting executive compensation. For example, she served as an expert witness in golden parachute litigation, obtained IRS clarification on Section 457A's impact on employee secondments, and amended the plans of foreign subsidiaries for 409A compliance.

    She was Chair of the Employee Benefits Committee, D.C. Bar, from 2003 to 2006, and Editor-in-Chief of Benefits Laws Journal, 1997 to 2002. She is a contributing author to The 409A Handbook (BNA, forthcoming 2010) and Cash Balance Plans (Aspen 2003). She is listed in Super Lawyers and has been listed in Best Lawyers in America since 1997.

  • Recent publications (with Kevin O'Brien) include 409A Failures: Correcting With and Without Notice 2008-113, Tax Notes, August 10, 2009; Vesting Deferred Compensation Under 409A: When Words are More Taxing than Deeds, Tax Notes February 6, 2006; Cash Balance Plans and Age Discrimination: The Statute Speaks and Most Courts Listen, Benefits Laws Journal, Spring 2005; Code Section 409A and the Hidden Deferred Compensation in Executive Employment Agreements, Benefits Law Journal, Winter 2005; Limiting 401(k) Fiduciary Exposure After Enron: Put Your Prose to Work, Benefits Law Journal, Autumn 2004; Discharging Deferred Compensation Obligations Upon Sale of a Business, Benefits Law Journal, Spring 2003; Double Indemnity: Does Your Plan's Fiduciary Indemnification Clause Protect Your Plan Administrator? Benefits Law Journal, Autumn 2002; Guilt By Association: The ERISA Fiduciary Status of Principals, Agents, Officers, Directors and Other Affiliates, Benefits Law Journal, Summer 2002.

    Rosina joined Ivins, Phillips & Barker in 1991, and became a Partner in 1998. Before joining Ivins, she served on the staff of the Ways and Means Committee, U.S. House of Representatives, where she had primary staff responsibility for benefits-related tax provisions in all legislation from the Tax Reform Act of 1986 through the Omnibus Reconciliation Act of 1990.

    Admission

    Verified District of Columbia

    1992

    Education

    Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University M.P.P.

    Ivins Phillips & Barker Chartered Highlights

    Employment, Estate Planning, International, Merger & Acquisition, Wills & Probate, Tax

    Firm Size: 1
    Firm Locations: 1