Rob Andrews: “I want to be very clear: The proposal that we support, the Democratic substitute, does call for a 3-year period, not a…”

“I want to be very clear: The proposal that we support, the Democratic substitute, does call for a 3-year period, not a 1-year period as some groups outside of this body are alleging. It is a 3-year period. The Republican proposal, the underlying bill though, I want to be clear about what it means to a person who is in a 401(k) plan that has her or his employer's stock matched in that 401(k) plan. Under the underlying bill, it would be 5 years before an employee could completely divest himself or herself of that stock. So here is what this means: If you were working for a company and the company put matching shares of its stock into your 401(k), and the company started to slide downhill the way Enron slid downhill, and you decided the best thing for you to do was to get your retirement fund out of that stock, get it out of there so that you would not be losing your pension, under the Republican bill that we are amending it would be a 5-year process, 5 years, before you could get all of that stock out. It is phased out 20 percent, then 40 percent, then 60 percent, then 80 percent. I do not see why people should be required to wait 5 years.”