DOL Gutted ERISA in 95 with PRT annuities without doing an Actuarial Analysis -now they are upping the corruption to benefit Private Equity, especially one specific insurance company Athene owned by Private Equity giant Apollo with deep ties to the Trump Administration.

As outlined in Pulitzer winner Gretchen Morgenson’s These are the Plunderers it shows how Leon Black made $billions off the 1992 Executive Life collapse, in which he created Apollo.  Morgenson warns of an even worse creation to come and gives it a name: Athene.

Athene was created by Apollo’s Leon Black and Marc Rowan with the help of Jeffrey Epstein and is regulated by the State Insurance Commissioner of Iowa.  Leon Black and Marc Rowan have been long-term donors to Donald Trump.  Trump has appointed Rowan to the Gaza Committee; Leon Blacks son was named CEO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.   Trump via his AG, continues to suppress information on Leon Black in the Epstein files.   So it is no surprise that Trump’s DOL has done all they can to enrich Athene and Apollo. 

DOL Interpretive Bulletin 95-1: Built Without the Actuarial Analysis ERISA Deserved An Insurance Credit Checklist Disguised as an ERISA Fiduciary Standard

Interpretive Bulletin 95-1 was issued by the Department of Labor in 1995. It established the fiduciary framework for selecting annuity providers when terminating defined benefit pension plans.

The Bulletin tells fiduciaries to examine factors such as:

• investment portfolio quality
• diversification
• capital and surplus
• size of insurer
• exposure to liabilities
• contract structure
• state guaranty associations
• administrative capability
• cost (only after safety is addressed)

Those are reasonable insurance-company credit factors.

But ERISA prudence requires much more than determining whether an insurance company appears financially healthy.

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Missing Requirement #1:

Compare Risk Against the Existing Defined Benefit Plan

IB 95-1 never requires the fiduciary to answer the most basic question:

Is the proposed annuity actually safer than remaining in the existing ERISA pension?

That comparison should include:

• PBGC insurance
• diversified trust assets
• employer funding obligations
• minimum funding rules
• fiduciary oversight
• federal enforcement

Without that comparison, fiduciaries never determine whether participants are gaining or losing protection.

Instead, the Bulletin assumes transferring liabilities to an insurer is an acceptable starting point.

That assumption was never subjected to a comprehensive actuarial analysis.

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Missing Requirement #2:

Prohibited Transaction Analysis

IB 95-1 almost completely ignores ERISA §406.

Instead it treats the transaction as if it were simply selecting an insurance company.

But many PRTs create obvious conflicts.

The employer often receives enormous financial benefits from selecting the lowest-priced insurer.

Those benefits may include:

• surplus asset reversions
• reduced pension expense
• balance-sheet improvements
• higher earnings
• executive compensation improvements

If choosing a lower-priced insurer directly benefits the employer while increasing participant risk, that should trigger serious prohibited transaction analysis.

IB 95-1 largely ignores that question.

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Missing Requirement #3:

Independent Risk Benchmark

IB 95-1 never requires fiduciaries to benchmark insurer risk against objective market measures.

Today fiduciaries could evaluate:

• CDS spreads
• bond spreads
• equity volatility
• capital market pricing
• peer insurers
• historical downgrade experience

Instead, many committees simply collect credit ratings.

Ratings are opinions.

Markets price risk every day.

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Missing Requirement #4:

Concentration Risk

A defined benefit plan is diversified.

A PRT concentrates retirement security into one institution.

That concentration itself is a material fiduciary issue.

IB 95-1 never requires any quantitative analysis of concentration risk.

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Missing Requirement #5:

Liquidity Stress

Today’s insurers rely upon:

• private credit
• structured finance
• direct lending
• offshore reinsurance
• affiliated investment managers

None of these existed in anything like today’s form in 1995.

IB 95-1 never anticipated these business models.

The Bulletin therefore provides almost no framework for evaluating them.

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Missing Requirement #6:

Related Party Conflicts

Suppose the insurer is owned by a private-equity sponsor.

That sponsor also:

• manages the insurer’s assets
• earns management fees
• originates loans
• manages affiliated private-credit funds
• profits from insurance spreads.

IB 95-1 contains no meaningful framework for analyzing vertically integrated ownership conflicts.

Yet these structures dominate today’s PRT market.

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Missing Requirement #7:

Cost-Benefit Analysis for Participants

The Bulletin discusses insurer cost.

It never asks:

What additional compensation do participants receive for accepting greater insurer risk?

Usually the answer is:

Nothing.

Benefits remain exactly the same.

Participants receive no higher monthly pension.

No equity.

No profit sharing.

No additional guarantee.

Only more concentrated credit exposure.

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Missing Requirement #8:

Independent Actuarial Risk Analysis

IB 95-1 never requires an independent actuary to quantify:

• probability of default
• expected benefit impairment
• downside scenarios
• stress testing
• long-term solvency

Instead it relies largely on qualitative judgments.

That would never satisfy institutional due diligence for billions of dollars of private equity, hedge funds, or private credit.

Why should retirees receive less analysis?

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Missing Requirement #9:

Comparison With Alternative Risk Reduction

A prudent fiduciary should ask:

Could the plan reduce risk without removing retirees from ERISA?

Examples include:

• liability-driven investing
• duration matching
• Treasury overlays
• high-quality bond portfolios
• partial annuitization
• ongoing plan funding

IB 95-1 never requires that comparison.

Instead it largely assumes that purchasing an annuity is itself an acceptable risk-management strategy.

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Missing Requirement #10:

Independent Fiduciary Verification

IB 95-1 allows reliance upon experts.

It does not require those experts to be independent from:

• insurance companies
• consultants seeking future insurance work
• investment banks
• brokers
• firms with contingent compensation.

That omission has become increasingly important as the PRT market has grown.

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I believe it was always a prohibited transaction and that a PRT annuity has 10 to 20 times the risk of the diversified DB plan with PBGC insurance. Insurance companies convert risk to profits and split it with the Corporate plan sponsor at the risk expense of retirees. My take is consumer and unions groups did not fully understand 95-1 so did not demand an actuarial analysis. My take is Insurance and Corporate Lobby US Chamber did understand so they blocked an actuarial analysis by the DOL.

“Should participants be transferred out of a diversified ERISA pension with PBGC protection at all?”  Is this a prohibited transaction.

Until courts begin asking the about the original sin of no actuarial analysis, many of the most important conflicts and risk transfers embedded in modern Pension Risk Transfers will remain outside the scope of meaningful judicial review.

This framework also dovetails with the themes in your June 2026 Private Equity Fiduciary Due Diligence Checklist: before exposing participants to a new risk structure, fiduciaries should identify conflicts, evaluate objective risk measures, compare alternatives, and document why the chosen transaction best serves participants—not simply why the insurer appears financially capable.

A traditional defined benefit pension combines several layers of protection:

• a diversified pension trust invested across many asset classes,
• ongoing employer funding obligations,
• ERISA fiduciary oversight,
• federal minimum funding requirements,
• and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation as a final safety net.

After a Pension Risk Transfer, virtually all of those protections disappear. The retiree instead relies primarily on the financial strength of a single insurance company and the applicable state insurance guaranty system.

Where Was the Actuarial Study?

One would expect that before the Department encouraged this transfer of risk, it would have commissioned a rigorous actuarial study comparing the probability of benefit impairment under the two systems.

To my knowledge, no such comprehensive actuarial analysis accompanied Interpretive Bulletin 95-1.

Instead, the Bulletin largely established a fiduciary process for selecting insurers rather than answering the more fundamental question:

Does transferring retirees from a diversified ERISA pension with PBGC protection into a single insurance company actually reduce or increase long-term retirement risk?

My View

In my opinion, the answer is clear.

A Pension Risk Transfer annuity generally carries materially greater long-term risk than remaining in a diversified defined benefit plan backed by ERISA and the PBGC.

Based on my decades of work analyzing stable value products, insurance company general accounts, and retirement-plan risk, I believe that difference can be on the order of 10 to 20 times greater risk, depending on the insurer, its investment strategy, and the protections being compared. That estimate reflects my professional assessment rather than an official actuarial consensus.

Insurance companies are not charities.

Their business model is to assume risk, price that risk, earn an investment spread, and generate profits for shareholders or owners.

Corporate plan sponsors also benefit because a lower-priced annuity often allows them to recover larger pension surpluses after terminating the plan.

The economic gains from transferring pension obligations therefore may be shared between insurers and plan sponsors.

The additional long-term risk, however, is borne primarily by retirees.

Why Wasn’t This Debated?

Another unanswered historical question is why Interpretive Bulletin 95-1 was never subjected to the type of actuarial scrutiny that accompanies many other retirement policy decisions.

My impression is that, in 1995, most consumer organizations and labor unions focused primarily on preserving pensions and did not fully appreciate the actuarial implications of replacing an ERISA-protected pension with an insurance contract.

By contrast, corporate interests and the insurance industry had a direct financial interest in preserving flexibility to complete pension risk transfers. It is reasonable to observe that business organizations, including groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have historically supported policies that facilitate pension de-risking.

Thirty Years Later

Today, courts are being asked to decide whether fiduciaries acted prudently when selecting insurers under a framework that was itself never accompanied by a comprehensive actuarial demonstration that transferring retirees from ERISA and PBGC protection into private insurance contracts actually reduces retirement risk.

That unanswered question may be the most important issue in all Pension Risk Transfer litigation. It goes beyond whether fiduciaries followed the right process. It asks whether the underlying regulatory framework adopted in 1995 rested on an adequate actuarial foundation in the first place.

The DOL’s New Athene Amicus Brief: A Green Light for Riskier Pension Transfers?  The Department of Labor’s newest amicus brief in the Bristol-Myers Squibb Athene litigation represents one of the most significant shifts in ERISA policy in decades.

But because it effectively tells courts that they should make it far harder for retirees to challenge whether fiduciaries exercised genuine prudence before handing pensions to insurers.

That is precisely the question Congress intended ERISA fiduciaries to answer.

Perhaps the most repeated theme of the DOL brief is that no insurer selected in a PRT has failed and therefore PRTs have “worked—swimmingly.”   No prudent fiduciary evaluating a bank asks whether the bank has already failed.   No prudent fiduciary buying bonds asks whether default has already occurred.

A new academic paper from the University of Texas and Yale reaches a striking conclusion. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7152239

 Private-equity-owned insurers no longer resemble traditional insurance companies. Instead, they function as integrated asset-management platforms extracting value through insurance spreads, affiliated management fees, private-credit arbitrage, and opaque balance-sheet transactions while relying on a state guaranty system that ultimately socializes much of the downside risk. Those findings are highly relevant to ERISA. When a pension fiduciary purchases a pension risk transfer annuity from an affiliated private-equity insurer, the fiduciary is not merely buying insurance. The fiduciary is entering into a complex transaction with a party whose incentives are fundamentally conflicted. That is exactly the type of transaction ERISA’s prohibited transaction rules were designed to police.

The Department spends much of its brief arguing that retirees generally lack standing unless insurer failure is sufficiently imminent. In other words, until the Titanic sinks – icebergs do not exist.   If fiduciaries ignore obvious warning signs before transferring billions of dollars in pension obligations, retirees may have little opportunity to challenge the decision until years later—after ERISA protections have disappeared and the pension plan has been terminated.   ERISA’s fiduciary duties were designed to prevent imprudent decisions before they occur, not merely to compensate losses after they become irreversible.

The Department of Labor’s newest amicus brief appears to shift the conversation away from fiduciary prudence and toward preserving the efficiency of the pension risk transfer market and increasing the profit of Private Equity insurers specifically high risk Athene.

https://commonsense401kproject.com/2026/06/22/prt-updated-litigation-risk-pension-risk-transfer-annuities/  https://commonsense401kproject.com/2026/03/26/apollos-garbage-dump-athene-loading-up-on-risk-endangers-retirees-in-prts-and-other-annuity-investors/      

https://commonsense401kproject.com/2026/01/11/dols-prt-annuity-amicus-brief-dismantling-erisa/  https://commonsense401kproject.com/2025/11/06/prts-why-courts-keep-ignoring-the-dangers-of-pension-risk-transfer-annuities-and-why-these-cases-must-be-appealed/