News first reported by the 爆料吃瓜 News Bureau that state auditor Keith Faber鈥檚 office will be performing a special audit into the state teachers鈥� pension fund went over big with educators at Thursday鈥檚 monthly meeting of the pension fund board.
The State Teachers Retirement system manages $94.5 billion in assets for half a million teachers. Some retired educators hired an investigator to look into the fund鈥檚 performance and fees after their cost of living adjustment was eliminated in 2017.
Suzanne Laird retired after 30 years of teaching. She said she still subs in the Worthington City Schools to pay for higher health care premiums.
She's been coming to STRS board meetings for years. On Thursday, she told the board that they should be "ashamed" for not listening to teachers who were upset about the loss of the COLA and about their concerns over fees and money manager bonuses.
鈥淵ou thought we didn鈥檛 know anything. You called us a bunch of malcontents. And yet now the state auditor has stepped up," Laird said.
Teachers in the room for the STRS meeting burst into applause when Laird finished her public comments to the board.
The auditor鈥檚 office says it got "numerous complaints" after former SEC attorney Ted Siedle was hired by retired teachers to look into the fund. Siedle's Benchmark Financial Services has done similar reviews of pension funds in other states.
STRS 鈥渉as long abandoned transparency, choosing instead to collaborate with Wall Street firms to eviscerate Ohio public records laws and avoid accountability to stakeholders. Predictably, billions that could have been used to pay teachers retirement benefits have been squandered over time as transparency has ceased to be a priority.鈥�
STRS said, which was shared at the board's August meeting, that Siedle's allegations are "baseless" and the fund has outperformed the market over the last decade.
STRS also notes that Siedle is not an accountant or an auditor, and that his conclusions about the Ohio teachers' pension fund are similar to reports he's written about other states when it comes to transparency and investment fees.
Siedle said in response: "No target of any investigation I've ever done has ever agreed with my findings. And if they did, I'm probably not doing my job."
