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The 2015 Pension 40: Phyllis Borzi
No. 5 Phyllis Borzi, Assistant Secretary for Employee Benefits Security / U.S. Department of Labor


for Employee Benefits Security / U.S. Department
of Labor
It’s been a long and challenging year for Phyllis Borzi, 68, who has been on the front line of an increasingly fraught retirement security battle among the financial services industry, Congress and consumer advocates. As her six-year tenure at the U.S. Department of Labor winds down, the assistant secretary for employee benefits security is under pressure to expand and increase retirement plan coverage and adequacy. One important goal: helping states create public-private partnership retirement plans for previously uncovered private workers; this includes forming multiple-employer plans that abide by ERISA and allow states to be service providers. If a state wants to take a non-ERISA approach with individual retirement accounts, Borzi says, “it needs to think about how to include a mechanism to ensure that contributions taken from people’s paychecks eventually get into the individual’s plan.” On November 16, Borzi’s team issued a proposed regulation and an interpretive bulletin to address those goals. Another longtime, and much-delayed, DoL policy goal that now looks like it may be finalized in early 2016 is a fiduciary rule covering broker-dealers and insurance companies, which, despite calling themselves advisers, have long been held to a lesser standard of client care than registered investment advisers. With a JD degree from Catholic University of America, Borzi has spent her career in and out of public service, including 16 years as counsel for the House of Representatives subcommittee on education and labor.
![]() 2. John & Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation ![]() 3. Chris Christie New Jersey ![]() 4. Randi Weingarten AmericanFederation of Teachers ![]() 5. Phyllis Borzi U.S. Department of Labor |
![]() 6. Kevin de León California ![]() 7. Alejandro García Padilla Commonwealth ofPuerto Rico ![]() 8. Laurence Fink BlackRock ![]() 9. Rahm Emanuel Chicago ![]() 10. Sean McGarvey North AmericanBuilding Trades Unions |
![]() 11. John Kline Minnesota ![]() 12. J. Mark Iwry U.S. TreasuryDepartment ![]() 13. Damon Silvers AFL-CIO ![]() 14. Jeffrey Immelt General Electric Co. ![]() 15. Joshua Gotbaum Brookings Institution |
![]() 16. Robin Diamonte United Technologies Corp. ![]() 17. Mark Mullet Washington ![]() 18. Terry O'Sullivan Laborers' International Union of North America ![]() 19. Raymond Dalio Bridgewater Associates ![]() 20. Ted Wheeler Oregon |
![]() 21. Thomas Nyhan Central States Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund ![]() 22. Karen Ferguson & Karen Friedman Pensions Rights Center ![]() 23. Randy DeFrehn National Coordinating Committee forMultiemployer Plans ![]() 24. Robert O'Keef Motorola Solutions ![]() 25. Caitlin Long Morgan Stanley |
![]() 26. Kenneth Feinberg The Law Offices of Kenneth R. Feinberg ![]() 27. Orrin Hatch Utah ![]() 28. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Center for Retirement Initiatives, Georgetown University ![]() 29. Ian Lanoff Groom Law Group ![]() 30. Joshua Rauh Stanford Graduate School of Business |
![]() 31. Ted Eliopoulos California Public Employees' Retirement System ![]() 32. Edward (Ted) Siedle Benchmark Financial Services ![]() 33. Teresa Ghilarducci New School for Social Research ![]() 34. Denise Nappier Connecticut ![]() 35. W. Thomas Reeder Jr. Pension BenefitGuaranty Corp. |
![]() 36. Hank Kim National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems ![]() 37. Paul Singer Elliott Management Corp. ![]() 38. Bailey Childers National PublicPension Coalition ![]() 39. Amy Kessler Prudential Financial ![]() 40. Judy Mares U.S. Labor Department |