Via Bloomberg
By Greg Stohr
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider giving workers who participate in pension plans more ability to sue when they believe the money is being mismanaged.
The justices will hear arguments in their next term from retired U.S. Bancorp employees who say their plan lost more than $1 billion during the 2008 market crash because the company invested all the plan’s assets in high-risk equities.
The case affects workers in defined-benefit plans, in which retirees are entitled to a specific level of income and don’t have individual accounts.
A federal appeals court said two retired workers couldn’t sue because the U.S. Bancorp plan had become overfunded, meaning the employees weren’t at any imminent risk of financial loss. That was at least in part because the company injected more than $300 million into the plan after the suit was filed in 2013.