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.