If you’re a participant in a state pension, there’s a full-length documentary about public pensions that state officials and their Wall Street allies do not want you to see. At its center, the film asks a simple but urgent question: Who is protecting the retirement savings of public workers when those charged with oversight cannot obtain the information necessary to fulfill their fiduciary duties?

Many states have underfunded pensions, which has led some states to cut pension benefits and others to raise taxes on the public. The documentary attributes this in part to the move into alternative investments, citing their high fees and returns that don’t meet benchmarks.

September is Life Insurance Awareness Month. Join us and AMBA for an educational webinar where we'll break down what to know and what to consider. Whether you're planning ahead for yourself or making sure your family is covered, understanding where you stand can help you make more informed choices for your legacy. There is no cost to attend, but registration is required.

Recently Allen Mendenhall & Dan Sutter published an article “Retirement at Risk: The Political Economy of Public Pension Governance” in the Journal of New Finance comparing STRS’s and OPERS’s reported returns and returns calculated using audited data. What follows is my review of the Mendenhall and Sutter article as it pertains to STRS.

"A preliminary injunction is hereby ISSUED, and it is ORDERED as follows that: Defendants (and those acting in concert with them) are preliminarily enjoined to HALT any implementation, enforcement, or any other action taken pursuant to, or in furtherance of, the amendments to R.C. 3307.05 and 3307.11 contained in H.B. 96." - Judge Carl A. Aveni, Franklin County Court of Common Pleas

As a massive pension fund hovering around $90 billion to $104 billion in assets during this period, even seemingly tiny basis-point underperformances translate into hundreds of millions of dollars.

This year the PBI faces continued controversy associated with the ‘Retirement at Risk’ paper. This paper alleges the returns to determine PBI are less than the verified or audited figures. STRS members want to know that the STRS staff are earning their bonus payments. Two actions would help to instill confidence in STRS.

Let me give you an example: the STRS actuary states there is $1.3 billion available for bonuses; a 2% COLA costs $ 0.8 billion, and the Board doesn’t provide a 2% COLA. How does ORTA explain that to our members?

"I have already reached out to both of the authors, and so I am going to be working on that issue, and I want either or both to communicate with Mr. Bernard and Retirement Study Council staff so that they can explain the methodology that allowed for that computation in the one column of Table 1. We've got to have Mr. Bernard, our staff, be able to reproduce those results." - Rep. Adam Bird, Chair, ORSC