Boston Archdiocese's Pension Plan Under Fire

The man who used to run the pension plan for the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston is asking the Massachusetts attorney general and the secretary of state to step in and take control of the plan. He says the plan is being badly mismanaged and is putting employee pensions at risk.

David Smith managed the Archdiocese of Boston’s pension fund for 10 years. Now he’s now retired and says the church is coercing lay employees to forfeit their pension benefits in exchange for a grossly inadequate one-time payout.

"There’s a need to collect millions of dollars from the Church and all of these trustees are conflicted," Smith said. "They all work for the Catholic Church and many of them — the outside trustees — have outside conflicts of interests, because their firms do business with the Catholic Church. Who is representing the employees? No one."

The Archdiocese says Smith’s financial management helped create the pension problem and it’s running the pension plan in a transparent and responsible way.

"What we are doing is a very responsibly transparent and fair way of trying to protect the beneficiaries," Archdiocese spokesman Terry Donolin said.