Controls Over Pension Asset Fair Value 3284



  • It looks like we get a lot of visitors to this forum, but not many new topics. Hopefully, this will get discussions going again.
    We are a public company and have a pension plan holding about USD1bn in assets. We have a trustee who is our record keeper as well as a few fund managers who manage separate investments in the plan. The fund managers are unrelated to the trustee.
    My question is - what internal controls do other public companies with pension plans have over the determination of fair values for the pension plan’s assets?
    We have generally relied on our trustee for fair values, but our auditors are pushing us to identify what our company’s controls are over the plan asset fair value determination. I can see their point in that management has responsibility for the financial statements (which includes pension asset fair values), but when we have outsourced this to our trustee, it would seem to be redundant to also verify asset values internally.
    Any thoughts?


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