Hearing stories from close relatives involved in pension management, I am a bit skeptical about the “institutional deception” being claimed in this story. A specific story that was shared was with regard to my relative attempting to repeatedly inform the organization’s pension “key man” (appointed by the union) of the fact that they were underfunding the pension account and that they were not able to get the returns “demanded” by the union. Over the course of several months, the key man avoided phone calls, meeting requests, and certified mail regarding the discussion of the problem. The law firm that my relative works for then sent a legal notice informing the union that their pension was being underfunded. The response was first from the key man, saying that the underfunding was unacceptable and malicious on the part of the law firm and that they needed to “figure it out” or else they would be sued. The law firm responded by informing the key man that the union had agreed to an annual sum being provided to the pension and that they were several hundred thousand dollars per year below the requirement. The key man then came back and claimed, like in the above story, intentional mismanagement and fraud by the law firm. The firm then cut ties with the union and transferred the funds to some new firm for the union to bully. No lawsuit was ever filed by the union and the union members were not informed of the underfunding of the pension. Somewhere down the line, similar claims to the one above will be made by that union against the managing firm and it will be a complete farce.

As a taxpayer, I’ve been funding CALPERS since at least the 90s due to mismanagment. The “baby boomer” generation should have been contributing in record amounts, since there are so many of them. Now that they’re retiring, this is only going to get worse. If the public pension funds DO finally get some real management and become profitable in the next decade — Will CA taxpayers be repaid with interest for bailing them out for 20-30 years?

its northern trust that is up to no good, i am a former client and they bilked me and cheated me, you know what i think happened? i think they paid pension consulting alliance off to look the other way instead of reporting northern trust activities to lacers, and perhaps pension consulting hoped for the best as regards the investments not losing . but northern is unreal, what they did to me, they actually contrived an artificial over fund to my brother’s account in a fifty fifty trust, added a condo to it twice as if there had been two condos, and then told me they transferred half that( fake ) overfund into my investment portion for my equal fifty fifty share of the trust, he got the whole condo in a cashless transaction, here is the key sign the paper, and they had no discretionary permission with the condo not to do it the way the contract calls for, say, watch out for them pretending to be dumb. believe it or not they will play that , and what else they do is call things inadvertent errors, as if there were any other kind of errors, they wrote me and said they forgot about the real estate in the trust for five years, after i raised all kinds of noise . they called it an inadvertent error. hey, feb. 16 the golf game five million , like last year, in los angeles, they aren’t sweating this, they could not care less, about the individual employees involved with lacers.

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