No More Limos for LACERA Board’s Travels

Board votes to mandate additional restrictions on travel permissions after current practices draw scrutiny.

After receiving criticism for the board’s relatively luxurious travel policies, the Los Angeles County Employees’ Retirement System sought to revise its rules governing such activities to implement additional layers of approval before members hop on a plane.

Last month, the Board of Supervisors voted to conduct a sweeping audit of its administrative expenses after an investigation deemed its “spending on education and travel…[is] significantly more than its peer organizations,” Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas said.

“Because LACERA’s travel expenses are charged against investment earnings, the Board of Supervisors has a vested interest in ensuring LACERA’s continued fiduciary responsibility to our workforce,” Supervisor Hilda L. Solis said in prepared remarks.

A review by the Los Angeles Times found that international excursions to a list of cities, including Abu Dhabi, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Paris, have racked up more than $1.3 million in expenses since 2015.

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This week’s revisions imposed additional limits on the number and cost of travel, and implemented a number of “control and compliance standards to ensure that enforceable procedures exist and that the proper paperwork is submitted for travel approvals and expenses to document that the policy is being followed consistently and transparently.”

These restrictions include reducing the number of permitted “educational conferences” for board members to four per fiscal year, down from eight in the current policy for members of a single board, and six per fiscal year for members of both boards within LACERA, down from 12 in the current policy. Only one international conference is permitted by any one member during a fiscal year.

Additionally, the revisions imposed that board members cannot use luxurious ground transportation such as limousines and executive cars, unless the costs of these services are comparable to that of taxis services such as Uber and Lyft.

An additional layer of review and approval for reimbursements related to professionals was tasked to the board’s executive assistants.

The board recently fired Chief Executive Officer Lou Lazatin for undisclosed reasons. She held the position for approximately eight months.


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Merging Australian Supers Get a New CEO

Computershare chief Scott Cameron will head Equipsuper and Catholic Super prior to consolidation.

Scott Cameron

Scott Cameron will be the new chief executive officer for Equipsuper and Catholic Super as the two Australian funds are set to merge.

Cameron will start in September, leaving his CEO post at the Melbourne-based stock transfer firm Computershare. The new merged company will officially start operating as such in October. For the monthlong interim, he will run both plans.

“This is a time of rapid transformation for the superannuation industry, with aggregation, increased efficiencies, and great potential for the application of new technologies,” he said.

The plans are joining as Australia’s government called for the consolidation of the superannuation industry earlier in the year. Since then, other funds, such as First State Super and VicSuper, have chosen to merge for various reasons. Some want to become that much bigger overnight while cutting costs, others simply want better returns by merging with larger, better-performing supers.

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Equip and Catholic are looking to do both, as Equipsuper Chair Andrew Fairley said the new organizational structure “will drive stronger performance through efficiencies and scale of investments,” when plans to merge were announced in May.

When the two supers seal the deal, they will manage A$26 billion ($17.5 billion) in pension assets, making the new organization Australia’s 10th-largest non-profit superannuation.

Fairley said Cameron’s experience “in bringing diverse businesses together” was what got him the job. “His experience of digital and advanced technology will also be an invaluable asset to the growth of the new combined fund,” he said.

A superannuation fund invests a nation’s pension assets for an entire sector, such as health care or labor workers.

Fairley said the Equip-Catholic organization’s asset value could hit $33.7 billion by 2025.

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