Breach of Trust by 401(k) Trustees?

Mutual fund families, despite serving as retirement plan fiduciaries and hosting “open architecture” plans, nevertheless favor their own fund offerings, according to new research.

In an academic paper published late last month, Veronika Krepely Pool and Irina Stefanescu, both of Indiana University, and Clemens Sialm of the University of Texas at Austin say that poorly performing funds are more likely to appear on 401(k) menus if they are affiliated with the plan trustee.

Titled It Pays to Set the Menu: Mutual Fund Investment Options in 401(k) Plans, the study eliminates the possibility that trustees maintained a proprietary fund on the plan menu because of information that the fund was poised to outperform, since subsequent performance was disappointing.

In fact, the reseachers found that trustee-affiliated funds underperformed by an annual 3.6% on a risk-adjusted basis, thus having a significant impact on retirees’ retirement income—especially considering compounded return effects. Moreover, the study determined that investors do not undo the bias toward the trustee’s funds through their investment choices.

The problem stems from an inherent conflict of interest between a fund company’s role as trustee of a retirement plan and its self-interest in promoting its own products.

ERISA regulations tolerate this conflict by requiring trustees to be “prudent” in selecting “suitable” investments.

Write the study’s authors: “We hypothesize that if the trustees’ decisions are driven by their own financial interests, mutual fund trustees may be more inclined to include their own funds in the fund lineup—even when more suitable options are available from other fund families—and subsequently more reluctant to remove them.”