Rosina B. Barker is a partner in Ivins, Phillips & Barker's Executive Compensation and Benefits practice. She advises many of the largest corporations in the world on the tax and ERISA issues raised by their employee compensation plans. She devotes significant time to cash balance and other qualified plans with complex or novel designs. She is recognized as preeminent in the taxation of executive compensation, and has drafted, interpreted or negotiated stock-based plans, nonqualified deferred compensation plans, change-in-control agreements, employment agreements, severance plans, and the like. Her long stint drafting tax legislation for the U.S. House Ways and Means Committee brings Washington know-how to her practice.

Rosina is regarded as a trouble-shooter and problem solver who brings technical precision and a practical, business-oriented approach to clients' most intractable compensation issues. Recent engagements include significant legal work for Xerox Corporation, Barclays Capital, Ford Motor Company, IBM, Fidelity Investments, Nissan USA, Lorillard Tobacco Company, National Semiconductor Corporation, Milliken & Company, SABIC Innovative Plastics, Grant Thornton, and Dover Corporation.

• Resolved the tax and ERISA issues in an innovative voluntary workforce reduction undertaken by a multinational corporation with over 80,000 U.S. employees.
• Devised an eleventh-hour section 409A solution when the buyer in a $5 billion acquisition demanded a comprehensive redesign of the target's severance and nonqualified pension plans.
• Broke a last-minute logjam in a $3 billion acquisition by producing the golden parachute analysis and computations agreeable to all parties. 
• Advised on the merger of two workforces totaling 60,000 employees, ensuring that the combined entity's qualified plans complied with complex IRS rules.
• Represented a client before PBGC and Treasury to gain approval of a pre-PPA funding strategy for a novel plan design, saving the client hundreds of millions of dollars over several years.
• Represented a client with a unique plan structure before Congress and the IRS, to win inclusion of needed provisions in 2006 pension legislation and in IRS guidance while working with business coalition representatives and government staff.
• Turned back an IRS challenge to a compensation deduction claimed by a large national utility by winning a 100% IRS concession on the courthouse steps. 
• Provided expert help on knotty issues affecting executive compensation. For example, she served as an expert witness in golden parachute litigation, obtained IRS clarification on Section 457A's impact on employee secondments, and amended the plans of foreign subsidiaries for 409A compliance.