A pension investigator asserts that under Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the state’s public school teachers’ retirement system has been manipulating financial reports by significantly understating the annual fees paid to Wall Street investment managers and showing unrealistically high returns, according to the New York Post.
Edward Siedle, an independent pension investigator, claims that the state-run Teachers Retirement Association (TRA) has only disclosed less than 10% of the $2.9 billion in fees it spent over the past decade. He also criticized the TRA for reporting gains that barely exceed its own benchmarks by 0.2%, which he described as “virtually impossible.”
“Even Bernie Madoff didn’t claim to beat the market every single year — and certainly not by the exact same percentage,” Siedle said, and referred to the TRA performance as a “Madoff miracle under Walz’s watch.”
The late financier Madoff orchestrated the largest investment fraud in Wall Street history, pleading guilty in 2009 to running a Ponzi scheme that swindled thousands out of their life savings.
Walz, who has been serving as chairman of the Minnesota State Retirement System since January 2019, oversees $140 billion in state employee funds, including $28.2 billion for teachers, the outlet reported.
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