SEND AN E-MAIL TO THIS FELLOWCynthia A. Van Bogaert
Encinitas, CA
Cynthia A. Van Bogaert retired in 2020 after working in a variety of employee benefits practice settings. After a rewarding career of helping great clients deal with employee benefits problems and gaining even more knowledge by teaching seminars on employee benefits, Cindy had a special opportunity at the end of her career to work at the IRS. She was pleased to be able to use that practical knowledge in the drafting of guidance at the IRS. In retirement, she has worked on the Deceased Fellows Website Committee for ACEBC and has been active in working with the informal Retirement Reform Group to find ways to improve the retirement system for lower- and moderate-income workers.
Her tax law roots began as a farm kid in Illinois and then Wisconsin. Among the many farm jobs she did, like driving tractors, hoeing weeds in soybean fields, and hauling hay bales, was helping with tax return preparation. Drafted to the job of hand-writing farm expense ledgers, she was intrigued by the complex tax depreciation and deduction rules her dad would explain as they worked together at the kitchen table. Wanting the challenge, she decided to pursue law.
After graduating from University of Wisconsin-Madison with a math undergraduate degree in 1980 and then a law degree in 1982, Cindy began her legal career at U.S. Steel tax division in Pittsburgh, PA in 1983, and then in Texas until 1985. She went back to Chicago and worked at Peoples Gas, Light and Coke as a public utility lawyer and in 1988 eventually ended up back at another steel company, Inland Steel Industries as the in-house employee benefits lawyer learning by working on qualified domestic domestic relations orders for their very large pension plans, helping with the ESOP implementation, and working on documentation and compliance issues with the in-house Human Resources and Finance departments. She had found her perfect career path in the fascinating and challenging area of employee benefits law.
Cindy practiced employee benefits law at Boardman Law Firm/Boardman & Clark eventually as a partner in Madison, Wisconsin, from 1996 to 2012. She wrote for the EBIA 401(k) book and speak for EBIA and other seminar providers. She also authored a 401(k) column on Benefitslink.com. She was involved with the ABA and spoke at conferences for ALI-ABA and many other benefits groups. She was National President of WEB, the Worldwide Employee Benefits network, served on the ACEBC Board of Governors, and was a trustee on the State of Wisconsin Employee Trust Funds.
In 2012, Cindy went to work at the IRS Division of Tax Exempt and Government Entities Employee Plans and, after a restructuring, eventually moved to the IRS Office of Associate Chief Counsel Tax Exempt and Government Entities Qualified Plans in Washington, DC until retirement in 2020. To her delight, she was able to work on many of her concerns from her practice days, such as missing participant issues (see, e.g., Rev. Rul. 2018-17 and Notice 2018-90 regarding IRAs and State Unclaimed Property Funds) and mid-year changes to safe harbor plans (Notice 2016-16).
For most of her legal career, she had an off-hours gig - running a corn and soybean farm. She also kept alive the family tradition of involving your family in your workplace by occasionally bringing her two daughters to the office on weekends to draw or color while she worked and by trying to explain the exciting aspects of retirement plans and health insurance to them.
