< The 2015 Pension 40: The Long Climb

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.

 
The 2015 Pension 40

1. Bruce Rauner Illinois 2. John & Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation Sponsored Is the Market Really Sure About Its Direction? Sponsored by CME Group October 27, 2025 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