Krueger v. Ameriprise Financial: DC fiduciary litigation

Krueger v. Ameriprise Financial (November 2012) involves a decision by the United States District Court District of Minnesota in a suit by three current and four former Ameriprise employees. Plaintiffs claimed (among other things) that Ameriprise and plan fiduciaries breached their fiduciary duty under ERISA with respect to the Ameriprise 401(k) plan by using Ameriprise-affiliated funds in the fund menu. Plaintiffs alleged that many of the Ameriprise-affiliated funds charged excessive fees or underperformed relevant benchmarks.

The case involves a number of issues that are unique to the use by ‘in-house’ plans of financial services companies of ‘in-house’ funds. We will not be discussing those issues in this article. Instead we are going to focus solely on the more general issue of the application of ERISA’s prudence standard to the selection and monitoring of funds in a 401(k) plan fund menu, and the application of the rules laid out in [Hecker v. Deere & Co.] in that regard.

Background

The case comes up on a motion by defendants to dismiss. Generally, under such a motion, plaintiffs’ claims can only be dismissed if, assuming all facts alleged by plaintiffs are true, there is no legal claim. We note that the facts as described in the court’s opinion are somewhat sketchy. We would expect a clearer picture to emerge in further proceedings.

Ameriprise maintains a 401(k) plan that allows participants to choose among different investment options. During the period the Krueger case relates to, the plan primarily (although not exclusively) used Amerprise-affiliated funds in its fund menu.

The plan maintained a 3-tier fund structure:

We note that this structure – target date/core/brokerage window – is a common fund menu design for large corporate plans and is considered by some to be emerging as a best practice.

With respect to Tier 1 (target maturity) funds, plaintiffs claimed that:

With respect to Tier 2 (core) funds, plaintiffs claimed that:

With respect to Tier 3 (the brokerage window), plaintiffs claimed that:

Based on these allegations, plaintiffs claimed that Ameriprise, certain affiliates and plan fiduciaries were liable under ERISA for (among other things) breaches of their duty of prudence in selecting Ameriprise-affiliated funds (and certain other funds) for the fund menu and failing to prudently monitor those funds.

The court’s decision

Generally the court found that plaintiffs had made sufficient allegations to get past a motion to dismiss. The most interesting aspect of the case (for plan sponsors that are not affiliated with any mutual fund) involved the court’s discussion of the ‘Hecker defense.’ As a preliminary matter, we note that Hecker was decided by the Seventh Circuit, and the Krueger court is in the Eighth Circuit — so Hecker is not directly controlling on the Krueger court.

The Hecker defense

Defendants asserted that plaintiffs had not stated a viable claim because even if, for instance, the Ameriprise-affiliated target maturity funds were overpriced and underperformed, the plan offered “a broad and diverse menu of investment options at market prices.” In Hecker v. Deere & Co. the Seventh Circuit held that, where there is such a broad range of investment options (the Deere plan included a brokerage window with about 2,500 fund options), the fact that some of them might charge excessive fees was not an ERISA violation. The decision is worth quoting at some length:

Defendants’ argument in Krueger, following Hecker, might be characterized as: the Ameriprise plan offers over 900 fund choices; the fact that some of them are overpriced or underperform is not a violation as long as there are others – e.g., funds available through the brokerage window – that are fairly priced and perform adequately.

Limits to the Hecker defense

The Krueger court rejected this defense. It noted that the Seventh Circuit, in denying a petition by the Secretary of Labor for a re-hearing en banc of the Hecker case, clarified that:

Further, the Krueger court found that “the Sixth, Fourth, and Seventh Circuits have found that merely including a sufficient mix of prudent investments along with imprudent options does not satisfy a fiduciary’s obligations under ERISA.” It also emphasized that this case, unlike the Hecker case, involves an allegation “that the Defendants selected Ameriprise affiliated funds to benefit themselves at the expense of Plan participants.”

Takeaway

This is a preliminary decision, and the court’s description of the facts and of its reasoning are (in places at least) sketchy. So we don’t want to overstate our conclusion. Moreover, in reviewing this decision it is, at times, hard to separate out the conflict of interest issues – which are unique to financial services companies that use affiliated funds in their own plan – from the more general requirements of a prudent evaluation and monitoring of a fund menu. But we believe the reasoning of this court may indicate that Hecker defense – that where you have a “broad and diverse menu of investment options” the fact that some underperform or are overpriced is not an ERISA prudence issue – may not be available with respect to the “basic options” in a fund menu, e.g., target date or “core” funds.

A final point: we have said in the past that proving that an actively managed investment fund’s fees are ‘too high’ is a challenge for plaintiffs in fee cases, because each fund manager can simply say that his or her or its fund management expertise is unique. But the Krueger plaintiffs got past a motion to dismiss with an allegation of above-median fees plus weak performance (in this case, given that the funds are new, weak performance with no prior history of strong performance). Whether that formula will work at trial (if this case gets to trial) or in other cases remains to be seen.

Litigation exposure for fund menu selection and monitoring is one of the major risks 401(k) plan sponsors face. We will continue to follow this case (if there are further proceedings) and fund menu litigation generally.