One goal of the inquiry is to deter­mine whether Gold­man Sachs and oth­er invest­ment advi­sors caused the Fund to lose mon­ey, endan­ger­ing the future pen­sions of retired truck dri­vers and oth­er Team­ster union members.

Bow­ing to the demands of thou­sands of angry Team­sters, the fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­i­ty Office (GAO) has agreed to con­duct an inquiry into the past invest­ments of the Cen­tral States Pen­sion Fund, the orga­ni­za­tion that man­ages the retire­ment ben­e­fits for more than 400,000 union mem­bers, both retired and active.

Rep. Mar­cy Kap­tur (D‑Ohio) hailed the GAO action as a vic­to­ry for work­ers, many of whom have been pres­sur­ing Con­gress to take action on behalf of the pensioners.

“It’s aston­ish­ing to now read about how Wall Street firms hired by Cen­tral States invest­ed retirees’ pen­sion funds in Iraq in 2008, right in the mid­dle of a full-scale war in Iraq. Or how they invest­ed in unsta­ble Russ­ian banks, when the econ­o­my there is in sham­bles, or how they sunk $1.4 bil­lion into risky Sin­gle A‑rated mort­gage-backed bonds in the mid­dle of the hous­ing melt­down. Some­thing is sim­ply wrong, and the GAO will get to the bot­tom of this,” she said.

Behind the GAO review is the con­vic­tion by some of the retirees that invest­ment advi­sors like Gold­man Sachs and the Chica­go-based North­ern Trust Cor­po­ra­tion prof­it­ed off the Fund by push­ing ques­tion­able invest­ment strate­gies while rak­ing in exor­bi­tant man­age­ment fees. If true, a full account­ing might lead to a return of some of the mon­ey lost and par­tial repairs to the dam­aged finances of the Fund, pen­sion activists say.

“The pen­sion plan lost $11 bil­lion in a 15-month peri­od,” while Gold­man was advis­ing the plan, and Gold­man should pay some of the mon­ey back, said Leroy Goans, a retired union truck dri­ver in Cincinnati.

Hopes that the GAO report will lead to a mas­sive recov­ery that will ensure exist­ing pen­sion ben­e­fits may be overblown, but the inquiry is worth pur­su­ing nev­er­the­less, says Nor­man Stein, a senior pol­i­cy advi­sor to Pen­sion Rights Cen­ter, a Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-based advo­ca­cy group that is advis­ing the Team­ster retirees.

Stein point­ed to a law­suit against North­ern Trust that was set­tled last year, in which North­ern Trust agreed to make good on pen­sion plan invest­ment loss­es involv­ing some of its oth­er clients, includ­ing the Chica­go Teach­ers’ Pen­sion Fund.

“I don’t have spe­cif­ic knowl­edge regard­ing North­ern Trust, but the case illus­trates that pen­sion plans can some­times recov­er loss­es when its advi­sors behave improp­er­ly,” he says.

But Stein expressed doubts that a law­suit brought by Cen­tral States, even if mer­i­to­ri­ous, could recov­er suf­fi­cient sums of mon­ey to make a real dif­fer­ence in the plan’s finan­cial health.

“Hav­ing the GAO look at this is a worth­while thing to do. The ques­tion is open on whether it will wind up help­ing the pen­sion­ers,” who face the threat of ben­e­fit cuts in the future, Stein says. ​“We just need to be patient and let the GAO do its job” of a thor­ough review.

Accord­ing to a spokesman at North­ern Trust, it has served as a court appoint­ed ​“named fidu­cia­ry” to the Cen­tral States Pen­sion Fund since 2005, with respon­si­bil­i­ty and author­i­ty to con­trol and man­age the invest­ment of cer­tain assets of the Fund.

“From incep­tion through Dec. 31, 2015, the North­ern Trust port­fo­lio has gen­er­at­ed returns in line with its bench­mark. The invest­ment loss­es stem­ming from the glob­al finan­cial cri­sis of 2008 were ful­ly recov­ered and are not a pri­ma­ry rea­son for the plan’s fund­ing gap,” spokesman John O’Connell said in an email.

Gold­man Sachs declined to com­ment for this story.

As report­ed by In These Times, chron­ic finan­cial prob­lems with the Cen­tral States Pen­sion Fund are threat­en­ing to force cuts in the pen­sion pay­ments to hun­dreds of thou­sands of retirees. Rep. Kap­tur summed up the prob­lem by esti­mat­ing the plan has about $16.8 bil­lion in assets but long-term pen­sion ben­e­fit oblig­a­tions of $35 bil­lion. With­out ben­e­fit cuts, or an infu­sion of new mon­ey, the plan ulti­mate­ly faces insolvency.

Kap­tur was one of the first mem­bers of Con­gress to come for­ward as an advo­cate for the Team­ster pen­sion­ers when they launched a grass­roots cam­paign last year to block pro­posed cuts. Con­gres­sion­al sup­port­ers of the cam­paign have been grow­ing steadi­ly in num­ber since then, and a for­mal request by Kap­tur and Sen. Sher­rod Brown (D‑Ohio) for the GAO to review the records of Cen­tral States was co-signed by more than 40 House mem­bers and 10 mem­bers of the Senate.

A bill joint­ly spon­sored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I‑Vt.) and Kap­tur — the Keep Our Pen­sion Promis­es Act (KOP­PA) — now has 10 co-spon­sors in the Sen­ate and 52 co-spon­sors in the House. Because all of the co-spon­sors are tra­di­tion­al pro-labor Democ­rats, activists like Goans are not opti­mistic the bill will pass in its cur­rent form, but believe that con­tin­ued lob­by­ing of Repub­li­can mem­bers of Con­gress could pro­duce a compromise.

“I think there are Repub­li­cans who want to solve this prob­lem. I don’t think any­body has hit on exact­ly the right solu­tion yet, but maybe the GAO will move us in the right direc­tion,” Goans says.