Financially, construction industry multi-employer pension plans are doing far better than their brethren on the single-employer side.

But multi-employer plans are hardly the picture of good financial health, and now Congress may be willing to provide help, mainly in the form of changing accounting procedures.

The Associated General Contractors of America is pushing a proposal in the House to allow multi-employer pension plans to change their "maximum deductibility limit" to 140 percent instead of the current 100 percent.

What that means, the AGC said, is that multi-employer pension funds would be better able to create sufficient savings for future retirees and to carry the plans through during market downturns.

Chuck Clark, a member of AGC's Michigan Chapter and president and CEO of Clark Construction in Lansing, told a House committee June 28: "If Congress would raise the maximum deductibility level to 140 percent, many of the funding problems faced by the industry in 2002 could be avoided in the future."

A statement by the AGC said it has been working with the Multi-Employer Plan Coalition, a group made up of employers, unions and trustees on the Taft-Hartley plans, to address the needs of multi-employer plans for the construction industry.

According to the National Electrical Contractors Association, which is part of the coalition, the bill, HR 2830, would also create a structure to identify troubled multi-employer pension plans. It would also provide appropriate triggers for determining when plans are under-funded as well as quantifiable benchmarks for measuring a plan's funding improvement.

The bill would provide a mechanism to assess the financial health of certain multi-employer pension plans, including "yellow zone" and "red zone" designations to indicate degrees of solvency.

The bill would strengthen funding requirements for "red zone" multiemployer plans and require trustees to develop a rehabilitation proposal to exit the red zone within 10 years.

Along with many other provisions, the bill also would change the amortization schedule for multi-employer plan benefit amendments from 30 years to 15 years.

Teamsters President James Hoffa said the coalition would work with lawmakers to make sure the pension plans "meet the retirement promises made to hard-working Americans now and in the future."