Pa’s largest pension fund admits for the first time that it’s under federal investigation Joseph N. DiStefano, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Pennsylvania’s largest pension fund board on Tuesday confirmed for the first time that it is a target of a federal investigation and voted to hire more lawyers specifically to help deal with the probe.
Trustees of PSERS voted unanimously to hire the New York law firm of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP “to provide guidance to the board in matters related to a federal investigation and any collateral issues,” according to a resolution. It was passed by the board shortly before 10 p.m. after a more than a five-hour meeting. “Well done,” banking secretary Richard Vague told fellow trustees.
Pa.’s largest pension fund admits for the first time that it’s under federal investigation
Updated 1:42 PM;
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By Joseph N. DiStefano, The Philadelphia Inquirer
The board of Pennsylvania’s largest pension fund on Tuesday confirmed for the first time that the plan is a subject of a federal investigation and voted to hire more lawyers to help deal with the probe.
Trustees of the fund, known as PSERS, voted unanimously to hire the New York law firm of Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP “to provide guidance to the board in matters related to a federal investigation and any collateral issues,” according to a resolution. It was passed by the board shortly before 10 p.m. after a more than a five-hour meeting.
Frankly, it’s surprising that it’s taken this long for an investigation of a public pension fund over allegations that it lied about its returns. But it’s not a surprise that it took Federal investigators, as in the FBI, to saddle up, in this case against a Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, aka PSERS.
Readers regularly lament how CalPERS regularly and obviously runs roughshod over the law and board members openly violate their fiduciary duty by not even pretending to oversee staff adequately and undermining anyone who dares to do so. That’s because CalPERS has the deficient governance structure that is pervasive among US public pension funds: boards captured by staff and a dearth of other local or state supervision and enforcement. So things have to get really bad, as with CalPERS former CEO Fred Buenrostro taking bribes, to get the FBI to go after misconduct. And yes, Buenrostro is now in Federal prison.
From Hong Kong to Sydney, San Francisco to Zurich, the staff at Pennsylvania’s largest pension fund have run up big travel bills Craig R. McCoy, The Philadelphia Inquirer
To oversee how a massive Pennsylvania pension fund invests its money, an elite band of Harrisburg-based finance experts traverses the globe.
They head to Wall Street, of course, but also to San Francisco and Boston, London and Hong Kong, Paris and Sydney, and Beijing and Bermuda.
Now The Inquirer has learned the cost of these trips by the staff of the $62 billion retirement plan for Pennsylvania teachers and school employees. The bills for some are startling.
YouTube/Lebanon Valley College English and Creative Writing
Humanities departments are suffering from a decade of declining majors and enrollments, plus “formidable” new pressures stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. The need for effective strategies to recruit students to the humanities has therefore “never been clearer,” according to a new report from the National Humanities Alliance.
The study isn’t necessarily a clarion call, however. It’s more of a trumpeting of the many ways departments are already actively attempting to attract students to their ranks. The NHA’s hope is that their collected on-the-ground accounts will help more programs grow, improve and break myths about what humanities majors learn and go on to do with their lives.