Opinion ID: 75921
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: the eastern decision

Text: 9 In June 1998, the Supreme Court considered the claims of coal company Eastern Enterprises (Eastern), which exited the industry in 1965 and argued that the Social Security Administration's (SSA's) retroactive assessment of premiums against it under the third tier of the Coal Act's allocation scheme constituted a taking and violated the Fifth Amendment. See E. Entrprs. v. Apfel, 524 U.S. 498, 118 S.Ct. 2131, 141 L.Ed.2d 451 (1998). The Court agreed with Eastern and declared this third tier invalid as applied to it. See id. at 537, 118 S.Ct. 2131. 10 In September 1998, the SSA voided all beneficiary assignments previously made to Eastern and more than 100 similarly-situated companies. This resulted in 8,119 beneficiaries, who had been assigned at the start of the 1998 plan year and in past plan years, being redesignated as unassigned beneficiaries for all plan years. 11 Upon receiving notice of this change, the Trustees refunded all of the premiums that companies excused by Eastern had paid over the years. They then retroactively recalculated the premiums of the remaining companies from 1993, the first plan year, to the present, as though the former Eastern beneficiaries had been considered unassigned beneficiaries from the outset. As part of this recalculation, the Trustees reapplied the past payments from the 1950 Fund and the AML Fund to these new premium assessments. Under this method, more of the 1950 Fund payments were used to cover unassigned beneficiary premiums, and less money could be set aside to cover death benefit premiums in plan years 1997-99. The Trustees therefore assigned, for the first time, a death benefit premium for plan year 1999 and retroactive death benefit premiums for plan years 1997 and 1998. In total, these recalculations resulted in an additional $21 million in premium liability for the remaining operators. 12 The Operators, all coal companies still subject to the Coal Act, then filed this action in district court against the Trustees. They filed a motion for summary judgment challenging the Trustees' retroactive recalculation of premium assessments against them. The Secretary of the Interior filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the Trustees. The district court denied the Operators' motion for summary judgment and granted summary judgment to the Trustees. The Operators appeal that decision to this court. This court reviews a district court's grant of summary judgment de novo. See Clark v. Coats & Clark, Inc., 990 F.2d 1217, 1222 (11th Cir.1993).