SEND AN E-MAIL TO THIS FELLOWAlvin D. Lurie
Alvin D. Lurie, who died in 2015 at age 92, led employee plans at the IRS at the critical roll out of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (“ERISA”). A highly-valued contributor on employee benefits law topics, he was inducted in 2000 as a Charter Fellow of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel (the “College”).
Al received his A.B. (1943) and his LL.B. (Bachelor of Laws) (1944) from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where he was co-Editor-in-Chief of the Cornell Law Quarterly from 1943 to 1944. He was admitted to the New York Bar in 1944 and the District of Columbia Bar in 1978.
Al was associated with the firm of Rabkin & Johnson before becoming a founding Partner of Lurie & Rubin in New York City from 1961 to 1968. He also was a member of the firm of Aranow, Brodsky, Bohlinger, Benetar, Einhorn & Dann in New York City. He was appointed Assistant Commissioner of Employee Plans & Exempt Organizations at the IRS from 1974 to 1978. Back in New York City after leaving the IRS, he was counsel at Chadbourne, Parke, Wolff & Whiteside from 1978 to 1984 and practiced at Meyers, Tersigni, Lurie, Feldman & Gray from 1984 to 1994. Al was President of Alvin D. Lurie, P.C. from 1996 in Larchmont and New Rochelle, New York, and Of Counsel to The Wagner Law Group from 2006 to 2014 in Boston, MA.
At the IRS, he administered pension tax law and regulated the tax treatment of the entire body of public and private retirement plans and exempt organizations (including, for example, charities, churches, public and private foundations, and labor unions) in the challenging early days of ERISA. In 1976, Al said of his job at the IRS, “I accepted this unlikely assignment at this stage of my life so that during the evolution, this new revolution, in pensions I might be able to bring some of the experiences of my private life into the role of administrator of this quite impossible statute.” He noted that the acronym ERISA “makes it sound too gentle and beautiful.” (For more of his insights into the issues and concerns he faced, see “Church Organizations under the Pension Reform Act,” 22 Cath. Law. 186 (1976).) For his service as Assistant Commissioner of Employee Plans & Exempt Organizations, he was the recipient of the Commissioner’s Award “for exceptional leadership.”
He chaired the Committee on Tax Policy (1980-81) and was a member of the Special Committee on Pension Simplification (1986-2004), both for the New York State Bar Association. Al received the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Employee Benefits Committee of the American Bar Association Tax Section (2007).
A skilled and prolific author and speaker in the field of employee benefits law, Al’s articles included: “A Call for Simplification and Rationalization of the Federal Pension Laws,” 8 Am. J. Tax Pol’y 1 (1989); “Cash Balance Plans: A Fate Hanging in the Balance,” 1 Corp. Bus. Tax’n Monthly 22 (1999-2000); “Split-Dollar Seesaw: IRS Makes Sense (and Dollars) of It All,” 2 Corp. Bus. Tax’n Monthly 3 (2000-01); and “Age Discrimination or Age Justification? The Case of the Shrinking Future Interest Credits under Cash Balance Plans,” 554 Tax Law. 299 (2001). He was an advisory board member to the New York University Tax Institute (1978-1990), an advisory board member to the publication “Tax Management” (part of the Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. which was acquired by Bloomberg, L.P. in 2011 and later known as Bloomberg Industry Group), general editor of “Bender’s Federal Income Taxation of Retirement Plans,” and an editor of the annual “New York University Review of Employee Benefits and Executive Compensation.”
Al’s speaking and writing style was entertaining despite the dry subject matter. For example, in the Age Discrimination or Age Justification article above about age discrimination issues involving complex pension plans, he noted that the “task of finding the appropriate rule borders on the job of the heart surgeon. One must stay focused, clear-headed, and steady-handed through the entire procedure (but the searcher for the rule of law will, at least, be spared the presence of blood on one’s gloves).”
Due to the depth of his experience with employee benefit plan operation, design, and policy, together with his gift for clever and insightful writing, Al Lurie has been described as the “Mark Twain” of ERISA. In 2005, the College created an Alvin D. Lurie award as part of its annual writing competition for law students in his honor.
A collection of 33 of Al's articles written from 2003 through 2015 is online in full text at: https://web.archive.org/web/20230911153008/https://benefitslink.com/lurie
Photo Source: The Decade Book, American College of Employee Benefits Counsel 2000-2010
