Does Your Employer Want You Dead?
Corporate America
reportedly pays up to $8 billion per year for "hedging" life insurance policies
on their employees (formally "Corporate-Owned Life Insurance"), and name itself
as the beneficiary. These policies make up more than 20% of all life insurance policies
sold, and can pay sizeable sums, tax-free, if an employee (or sometimes ex-employee)
dies. Among the hundreds of companies that have taken out such hedging policies
on the lives of valuable employees are Wal-Mart and Walt Disney, Winn-Dixie markets
and Dow Chemical, Nestle and Enron, Pitney Bowes and Procter & Gamble, AT&T
and J.P. Morgan Chase. Most states require the employee to be notified, but the
six of them that do not (known as the "Dead Peasant Insurance" states) are Delaware,
Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Vermont. You just might be
worth more to your employer dead than alive! |