Colorado Treasurer Aims to Sue State Scheme, Claiming Lack of Transparency

(September 19, 2011) — Colorado Treasurer Walker Stapleton plans to sue the state’s pension fund, alleging that the scheme has denied his repeated requests for financial data.

Stapleton requested data in June for details on how much money Colorado’s $39 billion pension fund for state workers paid the top 20% of beneficiaries and how they earned those benefits. Stapleton asserted that his motivation in suing the Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association (PERA) was his concern for the solvency of the scheme.

With a 66.1% funding status, the Colorado scheme is one of several public pension funds in the United States in an unstable condition, as noted in a report last year issued by the Pew Center on the States. In response to the fund’s deteriorating funding status, the treasurer has requested the “financial DNA” of the scheme’s beneficiaries, which includes information about annual benefits, age of retirement, last five years of salary, former job, and ZIP code of residency.

“As a PERA trustee and fiduciary, I must act in accordance with the care, skill, prudence, and diligence in light of prevailing circumstances that a prudent person acting in a like capacity and familiar with PERA matters would use. In order to carry out my role as a fiduciary, I am entitled to complete access to all PERA records,” Stapleton stated in the latter dated June 3 to Meredith Williams, Colorado PERA’s CEO.

“If responsible board members had asked these questions at an Enron or a Countrywide or a Lehman Brothers, we would have gone a lot further in addressing the problems that occurred,” Stapleton said, according to the Denver Post. “Our objective in this is to make sure PERA as a plan is kept solvent for current and future employees of Colorado.”

Attorney General John Suthers, a fellow Republican, represents Stapleton in the case.