| DECEMBER 17, 2014
This fall, Jim Carroll appeared before the Kentucky legislature's Public Pension Oversight Board and testified about the state of the nation’s worst-funded retirement plan. Over the last three years, said the co-founder of Kentucky Government Retirees, the Kentucky Employees Retirement System has exceeded its assumed rate of return -- yet it lost more than half a billion dollars in that time.
In fact, the plan has been in a virtual freefall for years. At the end of the 2013 fiscal year, the plan had $3.3 billion in net assets -- that's roughly half of its peak value just before the Great Recession. The gap makes it the pension system that has the farthest to go to recover the assets it lost in the stock market crash, according to a Governing analysis of 146 larger pension plans across the country.