Angela M. Bohmann

Shareholder

P 612.335.1510 F 612.335.1657

Angela Bohmann is the chair of Leonard, Street and Deinard’s Employee Benefits and Compensation practice group. In her 30 years of experience, Angela has worked on qualified pension plans, nonqualified deferred compensation plans, welfare benefit plans, fringe benefit plans and executive compensation. She is a frequent writer and lecturer on employee benefits topics, including contributing to the firm's Benefits Notes blog, which delivers analysis on the continuously evolving areas of health care reform, retirement plan design and executive compensation.

Employers come in many shapes and sizes, and Angela has assisted all of them. She works with public companies on their defined benefit pension plans and cash balance plans, as well as their executive compensation and equity plans. She works with small employers on retirement plans that are focused on benefits for owners as well as employees, and she has assisted nonprofit entities with the special types of benefits available to them, for example, 403(b) plans and 457 plans. Angela has advised employers on their COBRA, HIPAA and FMLA compliance. She is working with clients to comply with the Affordable Care Act, the new health care reform legislation, and assists them in maintaining compliant wellness programs. Angela also has extensive experience with benefit plans in mergers and acquisitions.

Angela has been recognized for more than ten years as one of The Best Lawyers in America with a special emphasis in employee benefits. She is regularly selected for inclusion in Super Lawyers®, and was included as one of the Top 100 Women Minnesota Super Lawyers® in 2009. Corporate Counsel magazine has recognized her as one of the top attorneys in ERISA and employee benefits in its nationwide listings. Angela is a Fellow of the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel, one of only a handful of Minnesota lawyers who have that honor. She was a member of the Advisory Board for A Guide to Health Insurance Reform, when it was published by Atlantic Information Services, Inc.

Prior to practicing law, Angela was a judicial clerk to the late Honorable James E. Doyle of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin.

Professional and Civic Activities

Great Lakes Tax Exempt/Government Entities (TE/GE) Council, Emeritus member
Midwest Pension Conference
Member and past president, Minneapolis Pension Council

Angela’s three decades of practice allow her to bring a wealth of experience to client matters:

Angela has helped a number of employers who are parties to collective bargaining agreements navigate the complex rules relating to withdrawal liability, both in the context of corporate transactions and in the context of economic downturns. She has helped clients negotiate agreements with purchasers that enable the sellers to avoid significant withdrawal liability on the sale of a business.
The IRS has available a program for employers to correct errors made in their qualified pension plans. Angela has submitted many applications on behalf of employers over the years under that program. Even before the program was formalized, she negotiated a modest IRS sanction for a nonprofit employer that had failed for many years to include a number of employees in its pension plan.
As wellness programs have become an ever important part of an employer’s health plan, Angela has assisted employers in navigating the many federal and state requirements applicable to such programs. She has helped employers design arrangements that encourage healthy activity, such as smoking cessation programs, as well as programs that penalize participants for failure to engage in healthy behaviors, such as premium assessments for failure to obtain generally accepted preventive care.
Angela has assisted employers in health plan benefit designs that reduce costs to employers, including assisting with dependent audits to make sure that dependents covered under a medical plan meet the employer’s eligibility requirements and designing programs that limit spousal eligibility where a spouse may have other employer coverage available.
Angela has assisted in drafting nonqualified deferred compensation arrangements and executive employment agreements that comply with tax code section 409A and has counseled employers in using IRS guidance to correct errors that occur in such programs.

Angela writes and speaks frequently on a myriad of benefits topics, including COBRA, wellness, nonqualified deferred compensation and retirement plans. Among her engagements are the following:

Articles

Benefits Notes blog (www.BenefitsNotes.com). View all posts from Angela.
Bohmann, Angela. Review of Recommendation Intoxication - How We Became Beguiled by an Unreliable Workplace Habit and What We Can Do About It, by Erin Haggerty. Wisconsin Lawyer, September 2012, Book Reviews.
“More employers tell staff, ‘Get healthy or else,’” Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal, September 21, 2007
“Is Your Health Plan Compliance up to Date?” Minnesota Lawyer, September 26, 2005
“Fighting Corporate Fraud—Corporate Fraud Act Makes Changes to Benefits laws,” Employee Benefits Planner, Vol. 10, No. 1, First Quarter 2003
“At Last, IRS Issues Final COBRA Regulations,” co-authored with Jeffrey P. Cairns, Minnesota Physician Publishing, Inc., 1999
“COBRA Regulations—Fourteen Years in the Making at the IRS,” Employee Benefits Planner, Vol. 6, No. 2, Second Quarter 1999
“Contingent Workers—Implications of a Recent Court Ruling,” co-authored with Jeffrey P. Cairns, Employee Benefits Planner Vol. 5, No. 1, First Quarter 1998
“An Employer’s Perspective—Tax, Spending Issues Dominate the Legislative Session,” co-authored with Ellen G. Sampson, Health Benefits Planner, Vol. 4, No 1, First Quarter 1997
“Beware the UBIT—Taxes on Qualified Plan Investments Can Bite,” Minnesota Medicine Vol. 73, October 1990
“IRS Issues new Pension, Profit-Sharing Regs,” Benefits Update, PaineWebber, August 1990
“Painless Perks—Tax-free or Tax-Favored Benefits for Executives Are Harder to Come By, But They’re Still Available with Careful Planning,” Minnesota Business Journal, May 1986

Speaking Engagements

Education

J.D., summa cum laude, Boston College Law School, 1978
Order of the Coif
Executive editor, Boston College Law Review, 1977–1978
B.S., summa cum laude, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, 1975