Retirement

President Barack Obama named Thomas Perez, an assistant U.S. attorney general, as his choice for labor secretary in his second term. Perez would replace Hilda Solis, ensuring that the Labor Department is led again by a Hispanic, helping the president maintain diversity in his cabinet. Solis resigned in January.

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation reports that shifting its enforcement policy away from companies unlikely to default on their pensions benefited about 50 businesses by almost $1 billion since the start of a pilot program announced in November.

Last week Richard Stolz in his article, Red Alert for Fiduciaries on Plan Financial Reports properly noted that plan fiduciaries are more vulnerable than ever on a number of compliance matters, including the financial statements included with their 5500 filings.

More than one-third (37%) of respondents in a Franklin Templeton poll say they are more concerned about outliving their assets or having to make major sacrifices to their retirement plans today than 12 months ago.

Ford Motor Co., while moving to close a growing deficit in its pension, will shift more of its plan’s assets to fixed income to shield against changes in interest rates.

The experts all seem to agree: 401(k) plans should be set up to automatically distribute small ($5K or less) balances of former employees into IRAs using well established safe harbor procedures.

More than 78% of plan sponsors are planning to maintain their offerings of stable value funds, according to the MetLife 2013 Stable Value Study

California should force state workers to use up their vacation time rather than bank it until retirement, the Legislative Analyst’s Office said after finding the cost to taxpayers has reached a historic high.

The Los Angeles Fire and Police Pension System, with about $15.7 billion in assets, is allocating about $785 million for commodities, its first investment in the asset class.

In most surveys, average defined benefit portfolios are found to outperform the average defined contribution plan account. And while that was true in Callan Associates latest “Callan DC Index” report, one category of target date fund -- 2030 funds -- performed markedly better last year than both overall DC plan assets and DB plans, presumably due to a higher average equity allocation.