Rob Portman: “If you are an Enron employee, you had to hold that stock until you were 50 years old. What this underlying bill says is…”

“If you are an Enron employee, you had to hold that stock until you were 50 years old. What this underlying bill says is, you cannot do that anymore. A company cannot require that the employee hold the company-matched, it goes into a 401(k), until the employee is age 50. In fact, you cannot do it for more than 3 years. There is an initial 5-year period where you can unload 20 percent per year so you do not disrupt the markets; and after that point, you cannot hold an employee with the corporate stock for more than 3 years. The handcuffs are off. That is a big change. Under current practice, you can hold somebody until they retire. You can hold them for 40 or 50 or 60 years. It also provides more education, and this is extremely important. I think there is a consensus on that among people in this area, on the outside and people here in Congress, that we have to provide people with better tools so that they can make better decisions once they have been given more flexibility and more choice.”