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Fiduciaries must drill down on Expenses

Investment managers and service providers to qualified retirement plans must disclose the fees they charges to the plan fiduciaries of the investing plans.  The Department of Labor launched a huge project many years ago focusing on these fee disclosures which culminated in a Final Regulation being issued in 2012.

ERISA lawyers, plan sponsors and services providers have devoted endless hours to compliance with the 408(b)(2) requirements.

Where have the Private Equity firms been?   And, where have the fiduciaries been?

Gretchen Morgenson reported yesterday, Pension Funds Can Only Guess at Private Equity’s Cost, that with respect to “rates of return and hidden costs”, private equity funds are as “impenetrable as a lockbox”.

Why are plan fiduciaries still guessing?

Many private equity funds implement restrictions with respect to the character of their investors so as to avoid certain requirements of ERISA.  Notwithstanding these limits, however, many ERISA qualified funds, as well as public retirement funds, do in fact, invest in private equity funds.   The fiduciaries of these plans have a statutory duty to determine that compensation paid to service providers is reasonable.   The disclosure regulations are designed to facilitate this determination.

According to Morgenson a few public investors, namely the Treasurer of the State of South Carolina, and a member of CalPERS, have tried to obtain data and information to assess whether the fees paid to private equity firms constitute reasonable compensation.   But, obtaining this data can be a challenge.

Furthermore, the relevant accounting rules are not clear.

Despite the opacity surrounding these fees, Morgenson reports that consultants and business academics have begun challenging the accuracy of the fee disclosures.  Morgenson links to a recently released study by CEM Benchmarking,  based in Toronto which addresses many of the complexities and deficiency with respect to recent fee disclosures.

All ERISA fiduciaries are on Notice.  It is your obligation to dig deep to understand the fees associated with a private equity investment.  Any fiduciary who does not have the expertise to make these determinations, should hire an expert for assistance.  Failure to do so could be a breach of fiduciary duty.

Given the resistance by Private Equity firms to these disclosures, the requests must be persistent, consistent and demanded by all investor fiduciaries.  Plan participants deserve as much.

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