Millions for Defense, Billions for Damages: State Street's Exposure
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Backdating. It’s a scandal. No, not that backdating. I mean when bloggers can’t get to something when it first comes up, and then go back in time to talk about it. That’s what I mean by backdating, and that’s what I am going to do today. Last week, I read, but didn’t have a chance to discuss here, this article from Bloomberg on the State Street Bank subprime losses and potential ERISA related exposure. The article was particularly interesting because it takes a tack someone different than most articles that, like this one, rely on lawyers to evaluate the litigation against State Street arising out of those events; most such articles focus on liability issues, the procedural defenses available to State Street under ERISA, and the defensive position that the company can assert. This article, though, asks and attempts to answer the million dollar - or in this case, more like the billion dollar - question of how much losing these cases will cost State Street. The numbers bandied about by well informed lawyers are staggering, even to the jaded eye.
The article rounds up the usual band of worthies to comment, including the Workplace Prof’s mild mannered alter ego, Paul Secunda, who tacks the eye popping number of “hundreds of millions to the billions” on State Street’s potential liability, and Boston ERISA lawyer Marcia Wagner, who noted that the plan administrators filing suit against State Street may have had no other options but to sue. To quote the article:
Wagner said fund managers hurt by the drop may have an obligation to sue as the existing plaintiffs have. “To the extent plans were misled into purchasing something they were not authorized to purchase, they may have a fiduciary obligation to sue,'' said the lawyer, who isn't representing the investment manager or plaintiffs. ``It's sue or be sued,'' she said. ``They allowed bad investments, so they should be attempting to make the plans whole.”
This echoes something I said in my last post on the State Street mess, in which I raised concerns about the fact that pension fund managers invested in the State Street products without properly understanding what they were buying. As I suggested in that post, administrators fall down on their own fiduciary obligations in such circumstances. As Wagner’s comment suggests, it may well be that the administrators’ fiduciary duties under those circumstances require them to then try to remedy their initial mistakes by suing to recover the losses, rather than compounding their own fiduciary breaches by simply absorbing the loss; that latter course of action would likely just make the administrators themselves targets for breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits based on their own mistakes in investing in the State Street funds.
Big Questions From A Small Story on a (Relatively) Small Loss
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Here’s a short newspaper story of a local municipal pension plan that suffered a $2.4 million loss to its pension fund, which is only about a $53 million fund, as a result of investments in subprime mortgage backed assets made either by State Street or in State Street funds (the article isn’t clear on the relationship between the pension plan and State Street, the current poster boy for breaching fiduciary duty by subprime investments). As the article points out, the pension plan has retained counsel to pursue State Street over the loss, on the theory that State Street did not adequately disclose the nature of the investments and the risk; this is pretty much par for the course for the various State Street subprime lawsuits being brought by pension and 401(k) plans, which essentially allege that volatile subprime related exposures were not disclosed but were instead contained within investment products sold as safe, conservative bond investments. Although dressed up to suit ERISA and breach of fiduciary duty issues, they can essentially be understand as highly gussied up bait and switch claims, in which retirement plan administrators and fiduciaries allege that they thought they were buying one thing from State Street - a conservative investment vehicle to balance out riskier investment allocations - but instead were sold something else, namely a highly volatile and risky exposure. State Street, of course, as the article reflects, views the cases otherwise, as instances in which the proper disclosure was made, but market downturns harmed the investments.
This whole scenario raises an interesting question, aside from whether it is the plaintiff administrators or instead State Street that is right, because no matter which one is correct in their interpretation of the events at issue, you still end up in the same place, which is that the plans signing off on these investments just plain didn’t know what they were buying. This is certainly the case if, as the plaintiff fund fiduciaries claim, they weren’t told the truth, but it is likely also the case if, as State Street claims, plan sponsors were told the truth and are now simply complaining about market outcomes; if it’s the later case, one can only assume that the sponsors didn’t understand the risk being taken when they signed up for the investment.
And this goes right back to the most important question of all here, which is what were the plan sponsors and fiduciaries doing when they were offering these investment options or making these investments themselves? This scenario speaks of poor investigation and over reliance on the investment provider, namely State Street, and suggests the plans themselves did not have proper processes, including independent administrators with the sophistication to analyze the investment choices and risks, in place for choosing investment options, prior to offering them to plan participants or investing the plans' funds directly. In this day and age, I think we are moving past the point of debating whether those types of processes are part of the fiduciary obligations of those running retirement plans.
And by the way, for the record, I am not buying the article’s spin that the loss was not that damaging to the pension plan discussed in the article, because it was only about $2.4 million. Against total plan assets of approximately $53 million, and with the taxpayers on the hook to fund the pensions because it is a municipal plan, that’s an important hit, both financially and to the public pocketbook.
Pension Estimates: Not Worth The Computer They Are Printed On
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Here’s an interesting decision out of the First Circuit yesterday, concerning errors in providing estimates of pension amounts to participants and whether a participant can hold the sponsor to the erroneous estimate, rather than receive only the correct amount under the actual terms of the retirement plan in question. Short answer? A participant only gets what the plan, by its express terms, grants, and not the larger erroneously estimated amount. Although it is fair to say that the actual outcome of any such dispute will depend on the actual facts of a given circumstance and the particular theories under which a particular participant elects to proceed, this case reflects that enforcing the estimate, rather than simply receiving the lower actual amount due under the plan, is an uphill battle, at best. In this particular case, Livick v Gillette, the employee struck out both on attempts to obtain the higher amount by arguing that the erroneous estimate was an actionable breach of fiduciary duty, and on an estoppel theory. The court’s analysis of the estoppel theory is particularly noteworthy, as it provides great fodder for any sponsor or fiduciary defending against an estoppel claim related to an ERISA governed plan. If you are litigating a case in the First Circuit concerning an estoppel claim related to the benefits available under a particular ERISA governed plan, this case would be the place to start.
Does Employer Stock Even Belong In Retirement Plans?
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Should there even be employer securities in a 401(k) plan or other retirement vehicle? That’s the million dollar question (or more like the hundred million dollar question) that cases like those arising out of the Bear Stearns collapse raise. Moreover, it goes right to the underlying tension between ERISA and the securities laws that plays out in the concept of fiduciary duty: namely, the extent to which it is appropriate for a fiduciary to continue to allow employer stock holdings in a retirement vehicle when the company is simultaneously facing market pressure on its stock price and an obligation to comply with the securities laws in dealing with the marketplace as a whole. The legal and philosophical issues of this inquiry go on and on, spinning on like a fall into the rabbit hole; this is manifest in cases such as the Seventh Circuit’s ruling in Baxter, discussed here, in which these types of issues are merely raised, but not resolved. It’s a good topic for a law review article, but since blog posts traditionally don’t run to the hundreds of pages, I am not going to get very far into answering those issues here, but rather want only to raise the topic, which I think will be played out in a fundamental manner in the case law as the subprime mess lurches its way through the legal system. And on a practical level, what raised this thought this morning was this story here in the New York Times about pension funds moving out of equities, because, while there is a certain apples and oranges aspect to any comparison between that issue and employee holdings of employer stock in defined contribution plans (in that pension funds are moving in this direction because of future liabilities related to pension plan payouts and not necessarily for the same reasons that an employee might not want to be invested in his or her own employer’s equities), that fact does raise an interesting question. Simply put, if the professionals who run pension funds are moving out of the stock market for, in part, volatility reasons, should comparatively unsophisticated 401(k) investors be allowed to, even in some instances encouraged to, overload with one particular company’s equities?
What Happens When ERISA and the Law of Insurance Coverage Collide?
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Wow, I guess this is really Seventh Circuit week here, with, I guess, a particular focus on the jurisprudence of Judge Easterbrook, whose opinion in Baxter I discussed in my last post. This time, I turn to his decision from Wednesday in Federal Insurance Co. v. Arthur Andersen, which strikes right at the intersection of the two subject areas in the title of this blog, insurance and ERISA. The Arthur Andersen opinion concerns the extent of coverage, if any, for Arthur Andersen’s massive settlement of lawsuits related to its retirement liabilities upon its well publicized, post-Enron collapse, under a policy covering breaches of fiduciary duty. The court found that there was no coverage, for a number of reasons, the most salient of which being that, first, the losses in question were the actual pension amounts, which the policy does not cover (it instead covers only other losses related to a pension plan, separate from the actual amount of the pension benefits in question), and second, that although the claims in question related to pension plans, they were not actually for breaches of fiduciary duty related to such plans, which is all that the policy actually responds to. There are some interesting lessons for plan sponsors and plan administrators in these findings: first, that it is important to remember that, in buying fiduciary liability coverage, this is not the same thing as insuring the benefits owed to pensioners themselves, and, second, that the exact scope of the coverage is narrow and limited by its exact terms, which may not extend coverage to the specific allegations of any particular lawsuit arising from the pension plan. What’s the take away? A close look by an expert is needed when selecting insurance coverage for pension plans and the people who run them, if for no other reason than to have an accurate understanding of the extent to which potential problems with the plans may actually be covered.
Beyond these lessons in the case for people on the ERISA side of this blog’s title, the decision provides a fascinating run through a number of complicated insurance coverage topics for those of you who are interested in the insurance coverage half of this blog’s title. The judge - or perhaps his clerk, I don’t know the practices in that particular court - writes fluidly on the law of estoppel, waiver, the duty to defend, and the respective rights of the insurer and the insured when it comes to control of the defense and settlement of a covered lawsuit.
A Blog to Pass Along, and Some Thoughts About the Supreme Court's Interest in ERISA
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Lots going on, lots to talk about. Let’s start with this one, which, coincidentally, allows me to kill two birds with one stone. You may recall that some time back I mentioned that I had come across two interesting blogs that I wanted to pass along, one of which was The Float, covering primarily investment related issues and their intersection with ERISA. I mentioned I would pass along the other blog in a subsequent post, which, almost inevitably since I had promised to do so, I never did, as breaking news and a pending trial shunted it to the side. Well, that other blog is this one, Benefits Biz blog, by the benefits and executive compensation lawyers at Baker & Daniels, which I have found to be a consistently interesting read. Moreover, I return to it today to pass that link along because of a very interesting post they have concerning a case that the Supreme Court has now elected not to add to its docket, concerning the relationship of age discrimination laws and employer provided health insurance benefits. As many already know and as I have discussed in the past here on this blog, the Supreme Court has shown a continuing interest in all things ERISA, with three cases either already decided or added recently to its docket. The Supreme Court’s lack of interest in this particular case perhaps hints - I am reading tea leaves here now, in the august tradition of Kremlinologists and other students of secretive institutions - at the outer limits of the Court’s interest in the subject of ERISA. The cases accepted for review to date by the Court emphasize litigation issues and, in particular, the effect of the evolution of retirement benefits from pensions to 401(k) plans on the litigation environment. This is not a fair reading of the case passed on by the Court that the Baker & Daniels’ lawyers discuss in their post; we may be able to infer that if you want to attract the Court’s interest in an ERISA case right now, you better make it about litigation and defined contribution type plans.
Back to the Well: Fiduciaries and Subprime Assets
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I guess this is the flip side of all the grief that is starting to come down on fiduciaries for excessive - or at least what seems to plaintiffs’ lawyers to be excessive in hindsight - exposure to the subprime mortgage mess in pension and 401(k) holdings: pension plan fiduciaries now adding such exposure to their funds in the hope of goosing returns by buying these beaten down assets at fire sale prices (kind of like they are playing at being Jamie Dimon). Here’s the story, and thanks to my colleague Eric Brodie for bringing this development to my attention.
Supreme Court and Qualified Domestic Relations Orders
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Interestingly, right after I posted about Albert Feuer’s detailed analysis of the proper role of Qualified Domestic Relations Orders (“QDRO”) in the ERISA scheme, the Supreme Court granted cert in a case on that exact issue (although I don’t intend to imply a causal relationship between the two events). The Court granted cert yesterday in the case of Kennedy v. DuPont Plan Administrator, but only on Question number 3 raised in the petition, which was whether ERISA’s QDRO provisions are the only manner in which an ex-spouse can waive rights to a former spouse’s pension benefits. SCOTUS blog has the story here, and the petition (as well as the opposition) here.
This order continues a trend I suggested we would see, namely the Supreme Court, having concluded its efforts to redirect the path of patent law after substantial criticism in the business, legal and academic communities that the governing body of law in that area was veering wildly off course, turning to another statutory body of law, ERISA, that has likewise come under significant criticism, in this instance because of the stress points that have erupted as the law of ERISA has attempted to cope with the transition from a defined benefits world of pensions - where employees bore little risk - to a defined contribution world, in which employees bear most of the risk and thus place more demands on ERISA and the case law interpreting it. Still, even under those circumstances, the focus on QDROs seems a slightly unusual point of emphasis for the Court, given the range of ERISA related issues that the Court could select from. The case and the issue presented do, however, concern pension benefits and the impact of ERISA on employee’s rights under them, fitting with the theme I identified above, plus QDROs themselves are being interpreted in some interesting ways at the district court level, as I suggested in this post, ways that may not be an exact fit with the statutory requirements.
Alienation of ERISA Governed Benefits
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I’ve had an interesting collection of educational materials and seminars piling up on my desk for awhile now, a number of which may be of interest to various readers of this blog. In the hope of both clearing up that backlog and passing along useful information, I am going to start a short series of - or maybe a series of short - blog posts on them, until they are exhausted. I expect I won’t run through them all seriatim, as I suspect breaking news or new court decisions will interpose themselves, but we will see.
The first one I wanted to pass along is something you can blame the Workplace Prof for, whom I have fingered in the past as the filter I use to screen law review articles and decide which ones might be worth reading. Some of you know from past posts that I don’t put a lot of stock in most law review publications, but some fit my criteria for being useful, which revolves heavily around whether they break any new ground in an area or manner that makes them useful to courts and practitioners. This one here, a 142 page analysis of when ERISA governed benefits can be transferred to anyone other than the participant or the participant’s selected beneficiary, fits this criteria to a tee. The Workplace Prof passed along the abstract of the article a little while back, which is:
This Article argues that a beneficiary designation made by a participant pursuant to the terms of an ERISA plan determines who is entitled to survivor benefits from that plan. Such designation may not be superseded by
(A) an agreement made in a marital dissolution or separation whereby a participant promises to make or retain a different designation (such agreements are not qualified domestic relations orders, "QDROs," because QDROs are limited to orders directed not at participants but at ERISA plans);
(B) an agreement made in a marital dissolution or separation whereby a participant's former or separated spouse "relinquishes" any interest in the participant's ERISA plan benefits; or
(c) a state law or federal common-law principle whereby killers of a participant are deprived of the entitlement to the participant's survivor benefits from an ERISA plan.
ERISA pension plans must incorporate the only two ERISA required beneficiary designations, QDROs and spousal survivor benefit designations. Neither statutory designation applies to an ERISA plan that is not a pension plan, such as a life insurance or disability plan. Thus, neither statutory designation may supersede a beneficiary designation made pursuant to the explicit terms of an ERISA life insurance or disability plan.
ERISA voids both (A) a direct benefit claim against an ERISA plan that is not based on a designation that was made pursuant to the terms of the plan, and (B) an indirect benefit claim against the recipient of plan benefits that is not based on a designation that was made pursuant to the terms of the plan.
What jumped out at me from the article itself is the author’s discussion of the application and impact of Qualified Domestic Relations Orders (known in common parlance as QDROs), which can supercede a participant’s designation of the party to whom plan benefits should be paid. The author gives QDROs a far narrower scope of application and power under ERISA than it appears to me courts have been giving to them, and in fact his position on their impact runs counter to what appears to me to be the trend at the trial level in the federal system in applying QDROs. He makes a fascinating and well-supported argument, although at this point, I reserve judgment on the ultimate issue he raises, of exactly how QDROs should be understood under ERISA. At a minimum, however, for anyone arguing the point in a case, there is a wealth of information in the article, as well as support for arguments that a party might make in court over that issue.
I Want My (Pension Tension Blues) MTV
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For better or worse, I’m old enough to remember where I was when MTV debuted, back when it actually played music videos. I am sure there is something to be said about the fact that a quarter century later, I now watch music videos about fiduciary risks concerning pensions, but I am not sure exactly what. You should watch it too, right here.
The Governance of Retirement Plans in the Aftermath of the Subprime Meltdown
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Fellow blogger Susan Mangiero and I are quoted extensively in a very interesting article, available here, in the January issue of the Institutional Real Estate Letter. The article, titled Investing in Good Governance, focuses on one of - if not the only - potential silver linings in the whole subprime mortgage mess, namely the possibility that it will help to focus pension plan fiduciaries on the fiduciary obligations, particularly as related to protecting plan assets from ill advised and ill informed investments, that they owe to the plan itself and to plan participants.
Researching Pension Related Litigation
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Dying is easy, comedy is hard? No, ERISA is hard. I tell people all the time that there is almost no such thing as a simple answer to an ERISA related question, or at least no such thing as a straightforward answer. There are entire chapters in ERISA treatises dedicated to the seemingly, but actually not, question of the proper manner in which to request plan documents so as to invoke the statutory obligations, upon financial penalty, imposed on administrators to produce them. Or take the question of equitable relief in a cause of action brought under ERISA; in almost every other area of the law, we all know what equitable relief is, but in ERISA, we have to engage in a historical inquiry into the development of the law of remedies to know if a particular claim is equitable or not.
Now when you add in on top the fact that ERISA and its imposition of fiduciary obligations is beginning to supplant securities litigation theories as a method for suing corporations and investment banks for subprime, stock drop and other investment losses, as discussed here for instance, you can see just how complicated the topic becomes, as well as how potentially dangerous for fiduciaries and plan sponsors are the issues raised by ERISA. And of course, that’s what makes practicing in this area fun for those of us who handle these types of cases. But it also makes thorough and timely analysis of litigation risks and exposures crucially important, and what looks to be a promising new internet based research tool to help with this is now available. Pension Litigation Data is now up and running on line, and is meant to be a tool that will allow up to the minute research into the numerous pension related lawsuits pending in United States courts. The subscriber based site “debuts with over 1,500 retirement plan legal actions, each classified by nearly 100 fields, including court circuit, type of allegation, plaintiff, defendant and date [and provides a] continuously updated and searchable database” on the subject. A joint venture of a couple of companies, including fellow blogger Susan Mangiero of Pension Governance LLC, I think it looks promising, and you may want to take a look.
The Recent History of Subprime Litigation
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Kevin LaCroix, at his D&O Diary blog, has a tremendous history of the recent filing of subprime litigation, including class actions, many filed under ERISA. While I don’t necessarily agree with each of his interpretations of that history, it’s as good an overview of the subject as a whole that I have seen in any media. Perhaps my primary point of departure from his presentation would concern his view that these cases are very different from other types of class action litigation, such as the stock drop cases, that are often criticized as lawyer-driven suits warranting reform, because these are cases instead being brought by “very large institutions [who are] suing other very large institutions.” Perhaps, and certainly to some extent, but there is also an aspect to at least some of these cases that reflect that the class action bar has, for reasons of legal developments, public sentiment, and the winds of politics, moved towards using ERISA in circumstances where they would have previously used the securities laws, as well as towards the representation of large retirement plans, rather than individuals, as plaintiffs.
The First Circuit on an Administrator's Discretion in Determining the Amount of Retirement Benefits
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Oddly, this appears to be “calculating benefits” week among the courts of the First Circuit. In addition to the LeBlanc case I discussed in the last post, the First Circuit just ruled on a case involving a challenge to the calculation of pension benefits. Just as in the LeBlanc case, where a district court found that the method of calculation would stand because the administrator had discretion in conducting that effort under the terms of the plan and the calculation method was reasonable, so too does the First Circuit conclude, in Gillis v SPX Corporation, that the administrator’s determination of certain factors in calculating retirement benefits would not be overturned because the administrator had discretion and the determinations made were reasonable given the plan’s terms and purposes.
Appellate Law & Practice, who chronicle all rulings out of the First Circuit regardless of topic, has this somewhat more tongue in cheek take on the case here. While the Gillis case, as the Appellate Law & Practice post reflects, concerns certain issues beyond just the reasonableness of the calculation approach, there isn’t much to the court’s analysis of those issues; the real take away is in the requirement of reasonableness in the calculation activity, and then proceeding from there, the court finds, without too much in-depth analysis of the issues, that the other issues raised by the participant simply don’t support a challenge to that reasonable approach to calculation that was applied by the administrator.
On Regulation of Fiduciaries and Pension Plan Vendors
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I was interviewed by a reporter recently concerning the subprime mess and its implications for pension plan fiduciaries, and the issue came up as to whether further regulation was the answer, as she had heard from a number of others. To me, the ongoing problem we are seeing with fiduciary breaches - or at least allegations of them - arising from plan investments involve one type of flawed plan investment being replaced by another; first it was too much company stock in the plan, then when that problem worked its way out of the system, it was excessive fees being paid for investment options, with that quickly followed by the latest flaw du jour in investment selection, namely excessive exposure to subprime risk. Regulation can’t predict and thereby prevent whatever may turn out to be the next problematic interaction between the investment community and the obligations of pension plan fiduciaries to act prudently in selecting investments. Rather, regulation will inevitably target the last problem that popped up, not the next one that is coming down the pike. At best, one could improve things at the margins through further regulation by targeting not the fiduciaries themselves, but the vendors who provide investment products to them, and even then only by imposing more transparency, which may at least give pension fiduciaries a fighting chance at understanding the investments they are selecting and the risks or flaws inherent in them.
This news yesterday out of the Department of Labor, that it is proposing a regulation requiring further disclosure to plans by vendors of their compensation, fits this to a tee. The proposed regulation will require that “all compensation, direct and indirect, to be received by the service provider be disclosed in writing.” Well, excessive fees charged by mutual fund companies and others for the investments held by pension plans and 401(k) plans is last year’s litigation problem for fiduciaries, and the world has already moved on to the next problem. Indeed, I would speculate that many fiduciaries have already accepted the need to engage in due diligence as to all aspects of their vendors’ compensation arrangements, both hidden and not, simply out of awareness of the past lawsuits that focused on the issue. It’s a perfect example that regulation can’t predict and protect fiduciaries and the plans they serve from the next particular investment problem, but can instead only identify and prevent a reoccurrence of a past investment problem for retirement plans. At the same time, though, the regulation is focused on the transparency problem, and on obliging vendors to provide information openly to fiduciaries and plans; that’s the best avenue for using regulation to aid fiduciaries pro-actively, by adding to the information they have access to in evaluating vendors and proposed investment choices.
Protecting Corporate Officers from Fiduciary Exposure
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Here’s an interesting article on one particular aspect of ERISA breach of fiduciary duty cases, namely the targeting as defendants of executive officers of the company sponsoring a pension or 401(k) plan; the gist of the article is that there are tactical and psychological benefits that accrue to counsel representing plan participants when they name officers of a company as defendants in such actions and allege that they are plan fiduciaries. Discretionary authority of any nature, of course, can render someone a fiduciary under a company’s pension or 401(k) plan, and those individuals can thereafter be rightfully targeted as defendants in a breach of fiduciary duty action related to that plan. As the article points out, allowing senior officers or directors of the company to engage in such activities can leave them open to suit, a bad idea because of the distraction and injury to company reputation of having senior management named as defendants in any major piece of litigation. The article’s suggestion to solve this problem? The old ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure approach. The authors recommend that, well in advance of any litigation and even with none hovering off, threateningly, on the horizon, companies return to the plan documents and make sure they are structured to keep senior management out of the operation and decision making of the company’s pension plans. In essence, delegate that job downward in the company, as far away from senior management as day to day operational concerns - as opposed to concerns of preventive lawyering - allow. In a company retirement plan structured in that manner, the ability to credibly assert that any member of senior management exercised discretionary authority over the company’s retirement plan - and to therefore charge them as fiduciaries - is very limited and possibly non-existent.
Looking Under the Hood of Pension Plan Investments
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Word comes to me today from Susan Mangiero, who pens the Pension Risk Matters blog (that phrase reminds me just a little of one of my favorite move phrases of all time, “a lot of alliteration from anxious anchors”), that I am quoted in an interesting article by Liz Peek in the New York Sun today, titled “Pension Fund Litigation Could Slow Investments.” The gist of the article? That there is a lot of hidden risk in pension assets that fiduciaries and plan sponsors aren’t fully cognizant of, and that this reality is placing fiduciaries at risk of litigation. The article, relying on data from Susan’s new company that tracks pension related litigation, points out the swelling numbers of lawsuits being filed over this issue.
Why ERISA?
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You know, people often get bogged down when talking about ERISA with the limitations of the statute and the protections it provides on the individual level; that is, to an extent, what the hullabaloo about the LaRue case is about, as it concerns the question of whether investment losses in a 401(k) plan are actionable if they only injure an individual, or instead only if they have a macro effect on the plan as a whole. But a look at the bigger picture on occasion reflects why we have ERISA, why its an important statute, and why it matters, despite the cottage industry of criticism that the statute and its interpretation by the courts has created. A story in the New York Times today jumped out at me as demonstrating the importance of ERISA’s imposition of fiduciary obligations on pension plans on a macro basis, as imposing a regime in which the interests of the plan participants whose retirements are at stake must be placed at the forefront of all considerations related to the management of a pension plan. The article concerns investment fund problems in a state government fund in Florida, created by the subprime lending mess. Before anyone yawns into their third cup of coffee of the day over yet another story on subprime lending (as the people at Mortgage Meltdown astutely pointed out recently, if you follow the mass media, you would end up with the erroneous impression that everything is, and everybody is holding, subprime debt), take a look at the part of the article where the elected officials who oversee the fund discuss possible remedies, and the first thing they think of is to raid the massive amount of cash in the state pension plan. And that, on a macro level, is the point of ERISA’s protection of pension plan participants, and its imposition of obligations on those who run such plans to act in the best interest of the participants in managing the plans: they represent huge piles of cash that can be tempting targets in the worst of times, and the obligations imposed by ERISA exist to counter that temptation. That’s a good thing, if you ask me, no matter how much criticism the details of the statute’s application provoke.
Is Subprime the New Stock Drops?
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The consensus in the legal community, and I don’t think it is just because they are looking hopefully for a new flow of work, has for awhile now been that fund investment losses resulting from exposure to the subprime mortgage mess will eventually generate substantial ERISA related litigation. There are plenty of avenues for these cases, not the least of which is plans and their fiduciaries bringing suit against investment advisors or investment funds for losses suffered by the plans on the theory that the advisors and funds improperly exposed the plan to such losses. This article here, out of the Boston Globe, provides a good example of exactly this line of litigation, detailing extensive losses to pension plans from investing in what were supposed to be conservatively managed bond funds at State Street. Here’s the overview provided by the article:
Institutional money manager State Street Corp. now faces three lawsuits over its management of bond funds that were touted for their conservative investment strategies, yet posted losses over the summer because of risky holdings tied to the subprime mortgage industry . . .The latest lawsuit was filed last week in federal court in Boston by Nashua Corp., a Nashua, N.H.-based maker of paper and imaging products, against State Street's investment arm, State Street Global Advisors. . . Nashua lost $5.6 million by investing company pension funds in State Street's Bond Market Fund, due to the fund's ’overexposure in mortgage-related securities,’ according to the lawsuit. Nashua's complaint seeks class-action certification, which could allow other companies that invested in certain State Street funds to join the case.
Perhaps of even more interest on this front is the complaint that was filed a few weeks ago in the Southern District of New York by Unisystems, Inc. Employees Profit Sharing Plan, an ERISA governed plan, alleging substantial breaches of fiduciary duties under ERISA by State Street related to the bond funds it managed that the Unisystems plan and other plans invested in. The complaint seeks to be certified as a class action, and was brought by the Keller Rohrback firm, which looks to be on its way to becoming the Milberg Weiss (sans the indictments) of ERISA class action litigation. The complaint itself in that case, which you can find right here, is a terrifically detailed, step by step overview of the subprime mortgage problem, how it impacts ERISA governed plans, and the fiduciary exposures which that credit crisis has created - at least in theory so far - for investment managers and other ERISA plan fiduciaries. If nothing else, it gives you the whole story of this line of potential liability for ERISA fiduciaries.
And the scope of this area of liability and potential litigation involving ERISA plans is as big as you would expect. State Street notes that:
Well, you know what? That’s still billions of dollars of investments at issue, and that’s only involving one potential defendant in these cases. As the old saying in politics goes, a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money.
ERISA, Investment Strategies and the Duty to Investigate
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ERISA litigation, particularly in the area of retirement benefits, is one of those areas of the law that can be particularly complicated because both the governing body of law and the underlying fact pattern to which it is applied can be tremendously complex. Take, for instance, the example of disputes over whether the fiduciaries of a retirement plan erred in selecting investments for the fund. This example, as you have probably guessed, is not chosen at random, but instead because Susan Mangiero has this interesting post here on a particular equity investment strategy involving short selling, and on the question of whether such an investment strategy by a retirement fund would be prudent or instead a breach of fiduciary obligations. The strategy itself is relatively complicated, at least to anyone approaching it from outside the investment world, and so too is the question of how it compares to other investment tools the fund could have selected. Fortunately for those of us who litigate such questions, the rules of evidence allow those questions to be answered in court by the use of experts who actually know these points inside and out and can comment on them in depth. These underlying factual details are ones that must be considered in passing on whether a fiduciary breach has occurred before even getting to the question of how a particular investment strategy fits within the fiduciary obligations imposed by ERISA.
After mastering the details of the investment strategy at issue, one then still has to evaluate whether its use was a breach of fiduciary duty under the law of ERISA. I am quoted in Susan’s post on the fact that this in turn depends heavily not so much on whether the investment strategy itself was sound, but more on whether the approach taken by the fiduciaries to selecting that investment strategy was sound. As Susan discusses in her post, this in turn depends very much on whether the fiduciaries sought sufficient outside expertise on the particular type of investment strategy at issue to allow a third party looking in on the decision making after the fact - such as a judge or a jury - to say that the fiduciaries fully considered the merits of the particular type of investment in question before investing and thus did not breach their fiduciary obligations, even if the investment went south.
What struck me about this duty to investigate, for lack of a better phrasing, is that the obligations of the fiduciaries in this regard in many ways mimic the approach of the ERISA litigator handed a case after the fact involving the particular investment strategy and the question of whether its use was a breach of fiduciary duties: the ERISA litigator at that point brings in independent experts to advise on the appropriateness relative to the market of using that particular investment strategy, and bases a defense to a large extent on testimony from such experts that the investment strategy was sound. The fiduciaries themselves, however, could have effectively deflected claims of breach of fiduciary obligation in selecting the investment strategy in the first place by doing the same thing before ever making the investment; retaining outside experts to render this opinion prior to making the investment provides a strong defense against claims that the fiduciaries breached their obligations by making the investment. Indeed, contemporaneous reliance on outside, independent expertise to evaluate investment strategies is perhaps the best steps a retirement plan can make to head off potential claims of breach of fiduciary duty involving the selection of investments.
In this way, the question for fiduciaries and the plans they serve becomes as much as anything one of pay me now, or pay me later. They can avoid problems by paying for independent advice and investigation before making investments, or they can pay for the same advice later in defending themselves if they are sued. As a litigator, obviously, I am happy to retain experts and resolve the problem after the fact; as a counselor, though, I would always recommend the preemptive approach of obtaining such expertise before selecting a particular investment strategy.
Number of Suits + Questionable Practices = X
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I have talked, certainly more than once, about the fact that the law governing fiduciary obligations in the realm of retirement plans is evolving, and most recently I commented on how it looks as though the Supreme Court is poised to weigh in on the direction of this evolution in the case law. Some of the evolution of the law in this area, it seems, is being driven simply by numbers. Susan Mangiero, author of the blog Pension Risk Matters, pointed out in a recent interview that we are seeing somewhere around 250 to 300 new lawsuits filed per quarter involving the liabilities of pension fiduciaries, mostly involving private company plans. As numbers of suits go up, simple experience tells us the courts will face new issues, or old issues under new fact patterns, and will issue rulings that advance the ball on what the shape of the law should look like in this area as a result. But the evolution is also driven, I think, by another issue I have commented on before, which is that, with pensions being replaced by 401(k) plans in which the employee bears all the risk, plan participants are motivated by that change to protect themselves against poor practices and oversights by those in charge of their retirement investments. And experts on the subject of pension governance suggest that they have good reason to concern themselves with these issues: Susan Mangiero points out in the same interview that pension governance practices quite simply leave a lot to be desired.
If there has ever been a roadmap to the evolution of a particular body of law, its right here in this scenario: more suits plus questionable practices by the targets of the suits.
More on Whether Socially Conscious Investing Is a Breach of Fiduciary Duty
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I have raised before the question of whether so-called socially conscious investing would be a breach of fiduciary duty if undertaken by a pension plan or 401(k) fiduciary. The National Law Journal has a neat opinion piece by law professor Edward Zelinsky right now to the effect that it would be. Here’s a link, although you may have to be a subscriber to access it. Either way, I think I am going to exercise my fair use rights under copyright law, and quote the professor’s conclusion on this particular point:
Inconvenient truth no. 3: Social investment dilutes fiduciary standards. Divestment for worthy causes, like other forms of social investing, opens the door to less noble uses of public pension funds by diluting the fiduciary standards governing pension trustees' investment decisions. Suppose that a group seeks to use public retirement assets to support the Hamas-dominated regime in Gaza. There are, of course, persuasive distinctions between an anti-Sudan investment policy and a pro-Hamas policy. However, politicizing public pension investments for good causes will invariably turn such pensions into battlegrounds as others seek support for their causes, not all of which will be attractive.
Instructive in this context are the traditional standards of fiduciary conduct including, in Benjamin N. Cardozo's famous formulation, "the duty of undivided loyalty." The insight animating this formulation is convincing: It does not matter if a fiduciary (like a public pension trustee) dilutes his loyalty to beneficiaries' welfare for a commendable cause. Once fiduciaries weaken that loyalty by considering any objective other than the well-being of their beneficiaries, the door is opened to causes that may not be meritorious. Even if trustees only pursue estimable objectives, they pursue such objectives with others' money, i.e., retiree's retirement resources.
I discussed in an earlier post an academic paper by a different professor arguing to the contrary, and you can find that here. So now you have both sides of the coin, and can make your own call. For me, though, I will return to my own roots - and initial instincts - as a litigator, and repeat something I have said before: if representing a client sued for breach of fiduciary duty, I’d rather be in the position of defending an investment strategy that called for maximum possible returns than one calling for only the maximum possible returns available by investing in good doobie companies.
Would Increasing Taxes on Hedge Fund Managers Harm Pension Plans?
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Just a quick note on something you may not want to miss, while I work on something more elaborate and, to me, thought provoking to post either later today or on Monday; those of you interested in hedge funds and pension investments may want to take a look at this article in today’s New York Times on Congressional hearings into taxation of hedge funds. The point of the article is whether increasing tax rates on hedge fund income will affect pension plan returns. The tone of the article is skeptical that it would have any significant effect, and much of the testimony at the hearing appears to have been along those lines. Obviously, though, as you can see from the article, many of those who would get hit with the higher tax rate think otherwise.
I’m really not enough of a tax expert - and I don’t play one on the internet either - to comment on this issue in any depth, although I do think the truth is probably in the comments of Russell Read, the chief investment officer of Calpers, who noted that “[i]t’s hard to tell what the effect [on returns by pension plans] would be” as a result of a change, but who “hopes” - I would substitute the word expects for the word hopes - “that it would be small.”
401(k) Plans and Increasing Liability Risks for Fiduciaries
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Coming off the holiday weekend, I have a long list of items I want to pass on or talk about. I will try to put up as many as I can over the next few posts, to work through the backlog. I thought I would start with this one, because it ties two of the items together. Susan Mangiero of Pension Governance and the Pension Risk Matters blog, passed along this article on last week’s decision by Judge Tauro that I blogged about here, holding that cashed out participants in a 401(k) plan could sustain breach of fiduciary duty claims, a finding contrary to that of some courts - including at least one by another judge sitting in the same district as Judge Tauro - but supported by the holdings of some other courts.
What I liked about the article, aside from the fact that it adds some further discussion about the case and the issues it presents to that contained in my earlier blog post on the case, is the article’s comment that the case is likely part of “a trend that will result in most courts following suit.” An animating theme of my posts and thinking on ERISA litigation concerning defined contribution plans such as 401(k) plans is that we are in the process of watching the case law evolve to hand more protections to plan participants, with a corresponding growth in the potential liability exposure of plan fiduciaries. As the world shifts from a defined benefit world - read pensions - to 401(k) plans, the law of ERISA is going to shift with it to better protect investors in those latter types of plans. For the first thirty years or so of the development of ERISA jurisprudence, defined contribution plans were simply not that important and the unique concerns of those plans - such as what becomes of the rights of cashed out plan participants, the issue addressed by Judge Tauro last week - played a relatively peripheral role in the development of ERISA jurisprudence. That is all changing and changing quick. Moreover, we can expect that evolution in the law to proceed with real force for some time, given the expected exponential growth in assets held in 401(k) plans. On this last point, three economist authors have done the heavy lifting, and document this point in this paper, as summarized in the abstract of their article:
Over the past two and a half decades there has been a fundamental change in saving for retirement in the United States, with a rapid shift from employer-managed defined benefit pensions to defined contribution saving plans that are largely controlled by employees. To understand how this change will affect the well-being of future retirees, we project the future growth of assets in self-directed personal retirement plans. We project the 401(k) assets at age 65 for cohorts attaining age 65 between 2000 and 2040. We also project the total value of assets in 401(k) accounts in each year through 2040 and we project the value of 401(k) assets as a percent of GDP over this period. We conclude that cohorts that attain age 65 in future decades will have accumulated much greater retirement saving (in real dollars) than the retirement saving of current retirees.
Follow the money is always a safe bet. As the majority of Americans’ individual savings move into 401(k) plans, the law governing those plans is going to shift with it.
I Got Them Low Down No Good Pension Blues
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On the first Monday morning in August I expect things to lighten up with lots of people on vacation and the like, so I scheduled a breakfast meeting this morning right in the middle of one of Massachusetts’ most congested highways (well, not really in the middle of the highway, more like at a restaurant off an exit off of one of the most congested highways), on the theory traffic would be lighter than usual. It wasn’t. But I still think August should be a lighter month, so today’s blog posting is musical. Here is a link to the song “Pension Tension Blues,” courtesy of Pension Governance. What is “Pension Tension Blues”? Pension Governance describes it thusly:
Inspired by those who bring attention to serious issues through humor, Dr. Susan M. Mangiero, [Pension Governance] president and founder, and Mr. Steve Zelin, the Singing CPA have co-created a (hopefully) memorable ballad about the state of affairs in pension land. Mangiero adds "Pension Governance, LLC is committed to helping fiduciaries do a better job of identifying, measuring and managing financial risk. We hope the song is a friendly reminder of the hard work ahead."
Why You Can Never Generalize When Considering Whether Brokers Are Plan Fiduciaries
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A couple of loyal blog readers have commented that I have veered off a good bit on digressions this past couple weeks, and I can’t deny it - maybe it’s a lawyer’s version of a summer fling. Anyway, today I return to a central focus of this blog, ERISA and, in particular today, investment advisors and their potential liability as fiduciaries. This law firm newsletter, passed on by the Workplace Prof, has a nice discussion of the question of when a broker or other investment advisor to a defined contribution plan (and I suppose a defined benefit plan as well) crosses the line, by rendering professional services to the plan, into the dangerous realm of being deemed a fiduciary. The Prof highlights the following discussion from the newsletter:
This is a nice summary of the point addressed in the newsletter, but as one of my law school professors liked to say whenever someone stopped after the first part of a holding, you need to read on. When you go the newsletter itself, you find that the summary really reflects simply the holding under a particular, and detailed, set of facts from one particular case. And that is exactly as it should be. The determination of whether a particular broker or other financial advisor to a plan became a fiduciary as a result of investment advice rendered to the plan is highly fact specific, and should turn on exactly what events occurred in any one particular case. As a result, one neither can nor should jump to any particular conclusion about the fiduciary status - and accompanying potential exposure - of any particular broker or advisor (or of brokers or advisors as a class) from the newsletter, the case discussed in the newsletter, or the Prof’s post. Instead, it is important to analyze the status of a particular broker on the basis of the exact role played by that particular broker or advisor with regard to a particular plan.
Common Misperceptions and The Obligations of Plan Sponsors
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I wrote, it seems to me, an awful lot over the last couple of weeks on the question of the fiduciary obligations of plan sponsors and others with regard to the investment selections made by pension funds and the investment choices offered in 401(k) plans. Susan Mangiero has a lot more to say about this in her series of posts - here, here, here and (most recently) here - on the due diligence obligations of fiduciaries when investing plan assets.
One particular issue that constantly comes up in this area is the belief of many employers and plan sponsors that they have satisfied any obligations they may have and have immunized themselves, for all intents and purposes, from liability for breach of fiduciary duty, by hiring an outside company to administer the plan and make investment decisions. Whenever I speak to people who offer investment and other assistance to plan fiduciaries, their need to disabuse fiduciaries, and particularly plan sponsors, of this belief is a constant topic of discussion. Quoting Rick Slavin, an attorney and former regulator, Susan nails down in three sentences why this is not the case:
You know, the simple fact of the matter is that, in all the areas I have litigated cases in over the years, plan sponsors have the easiest ability to preemptively and pro-actively position themselves to defeat an action against them - due diligence, due diligence and more due diligence throughout the life of the pension fund or defined contribution plan will come as close to serving as a silver bullet to protect plan sponsors as exists anywhere in the world of litigation. But plan sponsors who forget that they still have to engage in due diligence in the form of oversight and instead elect to rely simply on the fact that they retained an outside manager effectively forfeit this safe harbor.
Divestment and Fiduciary Duties
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Apparently there is something in the air these days about socially responsible investing and the fiduciary obligations of pension fiduciaries. I discussed here, just the other day, the argument that it is not a fiduciary breach to utilize a particular social agenda in investing and the litigation implications of that approach. Susan Mangiero has more to say on the same subject at her blog, Pension Risk Matters, here. I don't know about this one, frankly. I know, as I discussed in my last post on this issue, that the more defensible position, if sued as a fiduciary, is to have stayed out of socially responsible investment in preference for a focus on maximum return investing. But geez, who wants to be the one who says fiduciary obligations preclude avoiding, in the scenario Susan discusses, investments in so-called terrorist countries?
Criminals and terrorists in my last two posts. I don't know, maybe I better get off the ERISA beat and over to the digressions section of this blog, to write about intellectual property for a bit, a subject where, I don't think, I can find any reason to write about such things.
Criminal Restitution, Alienation of Retirement Benefits and the Supreme Court
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We return, as promised, to America today, to two particular, but certainly not unique, American obsessions, the Supreme Court and criminals. As discussed here and here, the Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal presenting the question of whether pension and retirement benefits governed by ERISA can be attached in the criminal context. As I discussed in this post, in at least some instances courts are finding that retirement funds can be attached as part of the penalty for criminal conduct, including to pay criminal restitution.
It is interesting - although there is probably nothing more to read into it other than that the Court agreed with the Solicitor General’s office that there was no circuit split warranting review of the precise issue presented by the particular case at issue - that the Supreme Court passed on this one, as they have taken on a fair number of ERISA cases, most recently accepting the LaRue case, which I discussed here and here, and which presents questions as to whether or not a single plan participant can sue for breach of fiduciary duty. And just a short time ago the Court reached out to address questions related to mergers and terminations of pension plans, as discussed here.
But I guess the question of whether or not criminals lose any protection provided by ERISA to their retirement benefits as a result of conviction doesn’t rate as high as those other issues on the Court’s agenda. And perhaps it shouldn’t. That’s an issue for another day, and one I will not voyage into today. But it is important to remember, however, that, as I discussed in a National Law Journal article a few months ago concerning one circuit that does allow attachment of a felon’s retirement benefits, alienating retirement benefits doesn’t necessarily punish only the wrongdoer, but may well seriously impoverish possibly innocent spouses, who may have expected to rely on those funds in retirement, and adult children, who may end up with no choice but to subsidize the so-called golden years of that innocent spouse. Of course, it is also fair to say that victims who have suffered financial losses as a result of the criminal conduct may have an equal, or even superior, claim to the funds. Either way, what is clear is that there is plenty of collateral damage to go around in the situation presented by this type of case, enough that it would certainly be worthwhile to at least have an authoritative decision out of the Supreme Court as to whether those courts that do allow attachment of those funds to pay criminal restitution or other similar sums are correct about it or, for that matter, that those jurisdictions who don’t allow it are correct.
Further Thoughts on Beck v Pace
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There are a number of reasons I don’t, as I mentioned yesterday, play the game of first to post, in which bloggers race to be first on the scene with a post about a particular subject, not the least of which is that I just plain can’t type as fast as the Workplace Prof, whose detailed and intelligent analysis of yesterday’s ruling by the Supreme Court in Beck v Pace can be found here. Also of interest is this detailed description of the ruling at SCOTUSBLOG by a guest blogger, a summer associate at the firm that sponsors that blog.
Beck presented the question of the extent to which the fiduciaries of a pension plan, that rapidly vanishing dinosaur of the employee benefits world, were obligated to consider merging the pension into a different pension plan instead of terminating the pension by the option of purchasing annuities that would provide the benefits to the participants. The two writers both focus on the fact that the Supreme Court handled the dispute by finding that the fiduciaries actually could not have considered merger, rather than termination, and that the Court, in essence, concluded that this finding resolves the issue presented by the case. As SCOTUSBLOG puts it:
For me, what I take away in particular about the ruling is a particular underlying fact, one that didn’t play a central role in the Court’s reasoning but that the author focused on late in the opinion as additional support for the conclusion that the fiduciary acted within its rights in terminating the plan, and was not subject to the additional merger related obligations that the union sought to impose on it; this was the fact that the employer had diligently and fully funded its pension plans, and its method of termination, although it had the side benefit of freeing up an extra $5,000,000 that would revert to the company and could be used to pay creditors, guaranteed the participants’ retirement benefits. In this day and age, where every day we see companies cutting back on pensions and we regularly see underfunded plans dropped in the lap of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, I am hard pressed to see how the company in this case could rightfully be faulted for terminating a properly funded pension plan in a manner that would protect plan participants. Too often, the law of ERISA is about cases in which participants are not fully protected, and the question is what remedy they do, do not, or should have - see, for example, the LaRue case. Here we have the reverse - fiduciaries who have fully acted to protect the plan’s participants, even if, by means of the surplus funds being taken out of the plan afterwards, some incidental benefit to doing so flowed to the sponsoring company. The underlying purpose of ERISA - to encourage and protect employee benefits - has been satisfied, so imposing possible exposure on the fiduciaries for not considering still some other approach to the ending of the pension strikes me as fundamentally inconsistent with the statute’s purposes.
The Supreme Court's opinion itself is here.
Supreme Court Rules on Beck v Pace
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I don’t generally like to play first to post, and would rather wait to see what I can add to the discussion of any particular issue before posting on a breaking story. But as I have been watching and waiting for the Supreme Court’s opinion in the ERISA fiduciary duty case of Beck v. Pace International to be issued, I was quick to read it today when it hit my in box and thought I would pass it along. Hopefully, I will return to it in the next few days - after a hearing tomorrow and a deposition on Wednesday - and talk more about it, because there are some interesting aspects to the Supreme Court’s opinion. In the meantime, here is a quick summary of the opinion from SCOTUSBLOG:
You can find the opinion itself here, and some news coverage summing up what the case was about here. My prior posts on the case are here and here.
More on Amaranth and Fiduciaries' Due Diligence Obligations
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In a post on Friday, I discussed how a large pension fund’s large losses from a hedge fund investment had given rise to litigation between the pension and the hedge fund, as discussed in this post in the WSJ Law Blog, and how it further raised the question of whether the pension plan’s fiduciaries might be liable to plan participants for their failure to properly vet and monitor that investment prior to the large loss. In essence, the question raised by the loss is whether the pension plan simply blindly - or at least half-blindly - invested the plan’s assets in the hedge fund without really understanding why or what they were doing, and was instead simply seeking to goose the pension plan’s returns without sufficient analysis of the risks, in much the same way individual mutual fund investors are often said to simply follow the latest investing trend without really knowing much about it or whether it is right for them.
Interestingly, I am clearly not the only one concerned whether pension fund fiduciaries and others charged with the management of pension assets are sufficiently knowledgeable about hedge fund investing and the ins and outs of any particular hedge fund, as the good folks at Pension Governance have now rolled out a series of webinars intended to educate retirement plan decision makers about hedge fund investing. Information about the series, called the Hedge Fund toolbox, can be found here.
A Thought About Litigation Against Fiduciaries For Hedge Fund Losses
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We’ve talked a lot on this blog about the due diligence obligations of fiduciaries and other advisors to pensions, 401(k) plans and the like when it comes to investment choices. A story yesterday offers the opportunity for a little thought experiment demonstrating why it matters, and why anything less than stringent oversight and investigation of investment choices will put fiduciary advisors front and center as potential targets of lawsuits.
The WSJ Blog yesterday had this description of litigation by a public employee pension fund against a hedge fund in which it had invested that managed to lose literally billions of dollars, in spectacular and newsworthy fashion:
Amaranth, the hedge fund that lost $6.4 billion in a few days last fall in the worst debacle in the industry’s history, responded today to a lawsuit filed against it in March by the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association, or SDCERA. SDCERA is the only investor to have filed suit against the hedge fund. . . At the time it filed the lawsuit, SDCERA said Amaranth’s collapse resulted from “excessive and unbridled speculation in natural gas futures that was directly contrary to statements made to SDCERA that Amaranth would be diversified and risk controlled.”
Amaranth says SDCERA knew exactly what it was getting into. In its motion, it quotes the funds private-placement memorandum, which read in big bold letters: THE FUND IS A SPECULATIVE INVESTMENT THAT INVOLVES RISK, INCLUDING THE RISK OF LOSING ALL OR SUBSTANTIALLY ALL OF THE AMOUNT INVESTED.
[A lawyer for Amaranth] said in a statement that he hopes “SDCERA will now withdraw its suit and stop wasting the resources of its 33,000 county employees and pensioners on this misguided and ill-fated litigation.”
So here’s the thought experiment to play out, the line of dots to connect. We know we are currently watching the rise of a pension/401(k) investment plaintiffs bar, clearly modeled after the securities litigation class action bar, ready and waiting to sue pension advisors and anyone else in the line of fire for excessive fees, poor investment choices, and anything else that affects returns in the plans. We see here as well in this blog post from the WSJ Blog that Amaranth’s defense to litigation by a pension plan is that the plan and its advisors knew exactly what they were getting into and should take responsibility themselves for the risks they took. Now here is where we connect the dots - if the hedge fund’s lawyers are right, then aren’t the plan’s fiduciaries and other advisors potentially liable for breaching their own obligations to the plan and its participants to properly select and monitor plan investments? And if so, then their best defense should the newly forming class action bar come after them for this mess would be that, contrary to what the hedge fund’s lawyers say, they actually did full and complete due diligence, and therefore lived up to their obligations and cannot themselves be liable for the fact that the investment went south.
And at the risk of sounding like a scold, that, I suppose, is what I would like fiduciaries to take away from the story of the Amaranth collapse, that hedge fund issues can come back on them, and they need to take steps in advance to insulate themselves. Just something to muse over on an early summer weekend at the beach, right?
More Recommended Reading: The Cavalcade of Risk
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The Cavalcade of Risk: 1st Anniversary Edition, is now up at Insure Blog. Noting that “it was a year ago this week that we published the first Cav,” Insure Blog explains that the Cav is intended as a round up “of interesting/unusual risk-related posts from around the blogosphere.” One of my posts is up on the Cavalcade, but perhaps of more interest to those of you who already read my posts, so are a number of other, interesting posts on insurance, employee benefit, and pension issues from some of my favorite bloggers. I recommend you take a quick gander, and hope you enjoy it.
Excessive Fee Litigation, 401(k) Plans and LaRue
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The current issue of the National Law Journal has an article providing an excellent overview of litigation over allegedly excessive fees charged on investments in 401(k) plans. The article notes the variations in the theories, and discusses what are likely to be large, class wide actions in the near future. There are those who think these types of claims are going away but, as this article suggests, that doesn’t actually look to be the case.
Now connect the dots between that story and the LaRue case, which I discussed here and about which more can be learned here, in which the Supreme Court is being asked to determine whether a single participant in a 401(k) plan can bring a breach of fiduciary duty claim for breaches that harmed only his account. Right now, with regard to the excessive fee issue, we are seeing, as the National Law Journal article reflects, the development of essentially plan wide suits. But if developments in the LaRue case establish that any individual plan participant can sue for breaches of fiduciary duty affecting that participant’s account, that will change. We will instead have a universe of individual participants, all with the capacity to sue over their own account balance and over any complaints they have that excessive fees drove down the balance of their own accounts over the course of years, and I suspect we will see plenty of lawyers appear who are ready and willing to represent individual account holders in such lawsuits. This will create a different litigation world for fiduciaries, plan sponsors, plan administrators and the like, then the current one in which the real risk is large plan wide actions by specialist plaintiff firms. In its place will be more of a death by a thousand cuts type of litigation regime that will confront plan fiduciaries and their allies.
I am not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, or a good thing. It is what it is. But in at least one way it may well be a good thing. We are all bombarded with the mantra that, in this defined contribution plan world we now inhabit, individuals are now responsible for their own retirement, as opposed to when companies provided it by means of guaranteed pensions. Well, I suppose if we are going to make individual plan participants the risk bearers and care takers of their own retirement funding, the least we can do is provide them with the legal tools to protect their investments.
Documenting the Death of Pensions
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I have written before about the question of whether we are creating a more litigious environment by switching employees from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans, and we all generally know that companies are overwhelmingly shifting employees from the former to the latter. Those of you in the retirement industry certainly already are aware of studies actually documenting that change and establishing that, in fact and not just anecdotally, pensions are going by the wayside and 401(k) plans are replacing them across the board. For the rest of us, Suzanne Wynn has this study, from Watson Wyatt, documenting that this change has, in fact, occurred over the past twenty years.
Pension Performance, 401(k) Plans and Breach of Fiduciary Duty Litigation
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This is an interesting paper, that comes to us via Workplace Prof, and which provokes further thought on the issue of the litigation boom involving 401(k) plans. The paper finds that pension plans outperform mutual funds, and attributes that differential to costs buried within mutual funds, as well as to the size of pension funds, which allows them to negotiate better deals on cost and related issues than would otherwise be the case. If you think about it, exactly that type of action is likewise what is expected of the fiduciaries of 401(k) plans, that they will assert themselves so as to avoid performance being affected by unreasonable fees or by other asset management decisions (such as overloading with company stock). One can think of lawsuits by participants against company 401(k) plans as being, at heart, driven by the failure of plans and their fiduciaries to live up to that high standard. Lawsuits involving excessive fees paid by 401(k) plans are in essence claims for failing to do what this article shows pension plans routinely doing: protecting participants against excessive costs impacting the plans’ returns.
Blogging on the Pension Protection Act
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I have been meaning to mention this for some time now, but other things always come up. So before the week takes me on to other issues that I want to post about, I thought I would take a moment and recommend to you Suzanne Wynn’s Pension Protection Act blog, which I have been reading for awhile now. In particular, Suzanne has taken on the burden of launching and hosting a weekly Carnival of Employee Benefits, which surveys posts on ERISA, pension and related issues from the preceding week.