John Hancock Appellate Win in 401(k) Tax Credit Suit Will Stand

Retirement plan trustees suing John Hancock Life Insurance Co. failed to convince the Eleventh Circuit to rethink its decision rejecting claims that the company wrongly pocketed $100 million in foreign tax credits that should have gone to the plan.

The trustees challenged the October decision—which held that John Hancock wasn’t a plan fiduciary subject to liability under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act—as mistakenly overlooking a Labor Department regulation defining “plan assets” under the statute.

Under that regulation, plan assets include a plan’s investment and interest in the underlying assets of an insurance company’s separate account, the trustees said ...