Consequences
- 01:00
Understand how the enactment of the employee retirement income security act changed how pension plans are managed
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So there were some fundamental changes to the way pension plans were looked after following the enactment of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act back in 1974. A fundamental one of these was that the company could no longer hold all of the pension fund assets, all the pension fund assets were looked after by a set of trustees who had a fiduciary responsibility to the members of the pension fund. Now, all the assets within a pension fund needed to be looked after carefully. This created the formation of custodians to look after the actual assets. The fact that trustees and deposit depositories were required to ensure investments were made on the best interest of the pension holders is probably the most fundamental change since ERISA came in in 1974, pre ERISA quite a lot of the company pension schemes were actually ran to the benefits of the company rather than the pension holders. Hence the reason many pension holders lost their entire pensions when a company went bankrupt or out of business.