Current rules defining highly compensated employees are very complicated.
These provisions are likely to survive a House-Senate conference and become law if the minimum wage bill becomes law. The IRS issued a number of new rulings in the last few months, a few of which were significant. The company operated a leveraged ESOP for all its employees. It sold a subsidiary by breaking the ESOP into two ESOPs, one for the company and one for the subsidiary to be sold. Then it allocated a pro-rate share of the stock and remaining loan to the subsidiary, which repaid its piece of the remaining loan through the sale of the unallocated shares.