Kwasha Lipton was an
employee benefits consulting firm located in
Fort Lee, New Jersey.
History
It was founded in 1944 by H. Charles "Chick" Kwasha and Maurice Lipton.
Kwasha Lipton is best known for creating a special type of
defined benefit pension
A pension (, from Latin ''pensiō'', "payment") is a fund into which a sum of money is added during an employee's employment years and from which payments are drawn to support the person's retirement from work in the form of periodic payments ...
plan called a
cash balance plan, which it designed for the employees of
Bank of America in 1985. Kwasha Lipton implemented dozens of cash balance plans for its other clients, and these plans were ultimately adopted by various companies throughout the
United States. Some employees allege that the plans discriminate against older workers in violation of federal
age discrimination law because of the way in which younger and older employees earn benefits under cash balance plans. Many cases found plan sponsors liable most were later reversed by appellate courts. However to retroactively approve the plan Congress enacted the
Pension Protection Act of 2006. This settled whether the
cash balance plan created ab initio violated age discrimination, however plan conversions which created cash balance plans out of existing traditional pensions by freezing accruals of older workers is still an unsettled issue.
Kwasha Lipton was acquired in 1996 by
Coopers & Lybrand
PricewaterhouseCoopers is an international professional services brand of firms, operating as partnerships under the PwC brand. It is the second-largest professional services network in the world and is considered one of the Big Four accounting ...
and became the Kwasha Lipton Group of Coopers & Lybrand. Coopers & Lybrand then merged with Price Waterhouse on July 1, 1998 to form
PricewaterhouseCoopers. The Kwasha Lipton Group was combined with PricewaterhouseCoopers' other benefit consulting groups to create Unifi, which shortly thereafter was sold to
Mellon Financial. Mellon combined Unifi with its
Buck Consultants
Buck (formerly Buck Consultants) is a global HR benefits and human resource consulting firm controlled by H.I.G. Capital.
History
Founded as an actuarial firm in New York City in 1916 by George B. Buck Sr., in 2016 the firm had more than 1, ...
subsidiary to create Mellon HR Solutions, which was sold to
Affiliated Computer Services
Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS) was a company that provided information technology services as well as business process outsourcing solutions to businesses, government agencies, and non-profit organizations. ACS was based in Dallas, Dalla ...
(ACS) for $405 million in 2005 and renamed Buck Consultants.
In 2010, ACS was sold to
Xerox for $6.4 billion. Buck Consultants was later rebranded as "Buck Consultants at Xerox".
Kwasha Lipton owned and occupied a building in Fort Lee, New Jersey. It is the first office building visible to the North after passing from
New York City to
New Jersey across the
George Washington Bridge, and it has views of the bridge and the
Manhattan skyline. The 13-story building has of office space, and was sold in July 2005 for $33.7 million. ACS remains the primary occupant leasing the building.
References
External links
Buck Consultants{{coord, 40.854661, -73.964685, region:US_type:landmark, display=title
Management consulting firms of the United States
Financial services companies established in 1944
Defunct companies based in New Jersey
Actuarial firms
Companies based in Bergen County, New Jersey
1944 establishments in New Jersey
Financial services companies disestablished in 1996
1996 disestablishments in New Jersey