A proposed class action filed in U.S. District Court in Austin says the tech giant committed multiple violations of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, which regulates private-sector retirement plans. The alleged\u00a0violations included keeping underperforming investments in Dell\u2019s 401(k) plan, engaging in prohibited transactions and failing to monitor and responsibly manage the plan, which potentially cost it more than $318 million.<\/p>\n
Dell didn\u2019t immediately respond to a request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In their suit filed Wednesday, former employees Allison Lowbruck, Adam Moss, Eric Rodgers, Michael Schwartz, and John Vedamanikam allege the company erred by continuing to allow investments in the Dell Pre-Mixed Portfolio Target Date Series and Dell Core Funds because they had not kept up with peer investment products. Target-date funds are investments designed to deliver specified results in a specific retirement timeframe.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The products were deficient, \u201cresulting in massive underperformance relative to that of well-established, prudently managed, comparable funds that Defendants could have selected for the Plan,\u201d their suit says.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dell\u2019s 401(k) program is massive, covering 63,000 people with nearly $15 billion in assets\u00a0\u2014 more than 99% of other defined contribution plans in the U.S. One-third of the Dell plan\u2019s assets were invested in the \u201cunderperforming\u201d products, which the suit cites as evidence of mismanagement. While the suit doesn\u2019t say the total size of the class, it estimates that thousands were impacted.<\/p>\n
It also accuses Dell of self-dealing. The company designed the funds, decided how money was invested, picked the managers and controlled how the assets were allocated, and collected fees from the decisions\u00a0\u2014 which allegedly violates ERISA. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs want the lost money to be recovered. It also wants any fees gained through self-dealing returned and asks for additional reforms to the 401(k) plan, like increased transparency.<\/p>\n
They estimate the potential class could include thousands of current and former employees.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A proposed class action filed in U.S. District Court in Austin says the tech giant committed multiple violations…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438137,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[28,147,530,117974],"class_list":["post-438136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-saen_share"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}