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What's new at EBRI this month:

The American Savings Education Council has posted the following on its Web site in connection with the 1999 Youth & Money Survey:

• New Youth Savings Poster and Interactive Calculator
• April 24, 1999 Media Advisory
• April 26, 1999 Press Release
• 1999 Youth & Money Survey Full Report
• 1999 Youth & Money Survey Highlights
• Fact Sheet: Financial Understanding and Money Management: Perception vs. Reality Among Students
• Fact Sheet: Student Exposure to the Real World: Work and Savings
• Fact Sheet: Teaching Our Youth

The EBRI Issue Brief and EBRI Notes for the month of April are available online for ordering. The April Issue Brief is entitled " Prescription Drugs: Issues of Cost, Coverage, and Quality." The April Notes article is "Small Employer Survey on Individual Social Security Account Administration."

EBRI Advisory: Statement of Dallas Salisbury on President Clinton's USA Proposal

Policy Forum Book: Beyond Ideology: Are Individual Social Security Accounts Feasible? contains the papers from EBRI's December 2, 1998, policy forum.

• The American Compensation Association provides listings of human resources-related congressional bills with links to the bills and to background information on the bills.
  • Senate bills
  • House bills

• Late-breaking news items from the weekly publication Business Insurance are posted every Friday before the Monday issue date.

• Click here for the latest available issue of the Washington Status Report from the research staff of Hewitt Associates.

• Milliman & Robertson's Employee Benefits Research Group provides monthly updates of a chart tracking employee benefits legislation: Monthly Benefit News and Developments.

• Click here for the daily edition of the Society for Human Resource Management's newspaper, HR News Online.

• Click here for the American Compensation Association's Compensation & Benefits NEWSLINE.

• The following items have been added to the General Accounting Office's Web site in Portable Document (PDF) format:

• State Pension Plans: Similarities and Differences Between Federal and State Designs. GGD-99-45. 23 pp. plus 7 appendices (133 pp.) March 19, 1999.
• Social Security: Individual Accounts as an Element of Long-Term Financing Reform. T-HEHS-99-86. 16 pp. March 16, 1999.
• Medicare: Progress to Date in Implementing Certain Major Balanced Budget Act Reforms. T-HEHS-99-87. 20 pp. March 17, 1999.
• Social Security: Criteria for Evaluating Social Security Reform Proposals. T-HEHS-99-94. 19 pp. plus 1 appendix (2 pp.) March 25, 1999.
• Medical Records Privacy: Access Needed for Health Research, But Oversight of Privacy Protections Is Limited. HEHS-99-55. 25 pp. plus 2 appendices (3 pp.) February 24, 1999.

If a GAO title link above no longer works, click here for the GAO Index of Reports and Testimony, FY99, and search for the report by entering words or phrases from the title. Reports will also be added to GAO's searchable WAIS database in ASCII and PDF formats within 24 hours of the original posting. Any individual report may be retrieved directly in text and PDF formats with the following URL: http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?RPTNO replacing RPTNO with the report number (e.g., GAO/OCG-98-1).

If your computer does not already have the free Adobe Acrobat viewer software to read PDF files, click here for the one-time download necessary to read PDF publications.

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(4/30/99) The April 1999 issue of the Watson Wyatt Insider includes the following:

• IRS Issues Final and New Proposed COBRA Regulations
• Benefit Adequacy in the Age of 401(k)
• Social Security: The Talk of the Town

(4/30/99) The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities presents a brief analysis by Robert Greenste>in titled: The Archer-Shaw Social Security Proposal.

(4/29/99) House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Archer and Social Security Subcommittee Chairman Clay Shaw announced on April 28 "The Social Security Guarantee Plan."

(4/29/99) The April 26 issue of BusinessWeek carries a short article titled: "Who's Minding the Baby? The Company."

(4/29/99) EBRI is mentioned in the CNNfn Quicken.com article: Retirement Plans for Small Biz: Retirement Plans are Valuable Recruiting Tools for Small Employers.

(4/29/99) Click here to play The Social Security Game on the Web site of the American Academy of Actuaries.

(4/28/99 ABC News is running a story by Donna Murphy Weston of the Associated Press on the Youth & Money Survey: Welcome to the Real World: Survey Says Students Find It Hard to Save.

(4/28/99) Fox Market Wire is running a business news story on the Youth & Money Survey: Survey: Students Agree It's Important to Save, But Only About Half Do.

(4/27/99) "Can You Have Too Many 401(k) Choices?" is an article in the April 26, 1999, issue of Fortune.

(4/27/99) Currently posted on the Social Security Network site: "Taking Stock: A March 19, 1999, Roundtable of Experts on Diversification of the Social Security Trust Funds" (Edited Transcript & photographs in PDF format).

(4/26/99) Click here for an excerpt from an A.M. Best Co. special report, "Medicare HMOs Face Shrinking Profit Margins" written by Manfred Nowacki, vice president; Richard Shaw, senior financial analyst; and Kenneth Frino, senior financial analyst, in the life/health division of A.M. Best Co.

(4/22/99) Click here to go to the Plan Sponsor April 1999, Future Shock issue's index which includes links to the following articles:

• "The Future Direction of Pension Provision in America" by Charles Ruffel
• "Rebuilding Benefits for the 21st Century" by Janet Aschkenasy
• "The Benefits Mix: If It's Broke, Fix It!" by Jerry Carnegie, Barbara Hogg, Mike Johnston, Rob Reiskytl, and Allen Steinberg
• "Tomorrow's 401(k)" by Don Butt
• "Cash Balance: Best of Both Worlds?" by Lawrence J Sher
• "New Millennium's Nightmare: Outliving Assets" by Anna M. Rappaport
• "Rebuilding the "Three-Legged Stool"" by Elayne Robertson Demby

(4/21/99) Click here to view Senate Finance Committee Chair William Roth's statement released April 14, 1999, on President Clinton's USA accounts proposal .

(4/21/99) The Heritage Foundation and a coalition of other conservative groups have posted "The Social Security Reform Center."

(4/20/99) The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provides the Mutual Fund Cost Calculator, "a new Internet-based tool developed by the SEC that enables investors to easily compare fund costs and assess their impact."

(4/19/99) The Economic Policy Institute presents The Pulse on…Social Security currently hosting a discussion of the public's attitutes on the Social Security system.

(4/16/99) Information Renaissance in collaboration with Americans Discuss Social Security is hosting from April 19 through June 4, 1999, a non-partisan electronic discussion and debate on Social Security reform called the National Dialogue on Social Security. Click here for more information.

(4/15/99) White House information on USA Accounts:

• Details released by the White House
• Remarks of the President on Universal Savings Accounts
• April 14 press briefing by Director of the National Economic Council Gene Sperling and Deputy Secretary of Treasury Larry Summers
• White House Fact Sheet on USA Accounts Plan

(4/14/99) Clinton Details Retirement Accounts is the title of the Associated Press story on the New York Times on the Web about the details of President Clinton's plan for personal investment accounts (USA accounts) for retirement.

(4/13/99) Click here for Social Security and Poverty Among the Elderly by Wendell Primus, Kathy Larin and Kathryn Porter from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

(4/12/99) Now available from the Census Bureau: Working Paper No. 32 -- Women's Labor Force Attachment Patterns and Maternity Leave: A Review of the Literature.

(4/9/99) Towers Perrin analyzes the hot topic of cash balance pension plans in The Controversy Over Cash Balance Plans.

(4/9/99) Catherwood Library at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, has created a Web site that is a good starting point for research on labor unions: Labor Unions and the Internet.

(4/8/99) The AFL-CIO has set up an online section with information on Social Security basics and reform.

(4/7/99) The Heritage Foundation has posted a policy paper: The Wrong Social Security Debate: It Is Not About Trust Funds by David C. John.

(4/1/99) The 1999 Social Security and Medicare Trustees reports have been released:

• Click here to go to the summary page
• Status of the Social Security and Medicare Programs: A Summary of the 1999 Annual Reports
• Statement of Kenneth S. Apfel, Commissioner of Social Security, concerning the release of the 1999 Annual Report of the Social Security Board of Trustees
• 1999 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance Trust Funds
• 1999 Annual Reports of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Hospital Insurance and Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Funds

(4/1/99) The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) released its financial results for 1998. Click here for the press release which will lead you to the 1998 Annual Report.

(4/1/99) Two recent reports on Social Security reform from the Heritage Foundation:

• The Mueller Social Security Report is Flawed by Gareth G. Davis and David C. John
• Hard Questions Remain for the Social Security Lockbox by David C. John

(4/1/99) Revisiting Fund Costs: Up or Down? discusses stock-fund ownership costs.

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