The Office of the District Attorney’s Response to Allegheny County Treasurer
As I pointed out in my lawsuit filed against the Retirement Board of Allegheny County (RBAC) in December 2024, and as confirmed by the RBAC’s own consultant in the July 2026 Report, the RBAC for years used an unrealistically high 7.75% assumed investment rate of return to compute its pension liability.
RBAC used a high investment rate of return to artificially shrink its pension liabilities in order to hide the true scope of the massive pension disaster. This scheme lowers the required pension contribution in the short-term, shifting massive debt onto future taxpayers and jeopardizing the long-term solvency of the pension fund; such as we currently face.
This is how RBAC in part, concealed its massive $1.4 billion debt that it now asks County residents to pay over-time in crushing installments of $100 million per year for the next 20 years.
County Treasurer, Erica Rocchi Brusselars, became a member of the RBAC in January 2024. Her resume on the RBAC website states she is an experienced “private-sector actuary.” There are news claims she “made a career out of managing pension funds.”
Last evening in a television interview, Ms. Brusselars disclosed to a reporter that RBAC’s “past board members continually over estimated investment returns.”
As an experienced actuary and a fiduciary to this fund, with knowledge that the RBAC’s assumed investment rate was too high, why did she not come forward before?
My investigation of the RBAC began in May 2024 following receipt of a whistleblower’s complaint alleging pension irregularities. I never heard from Ms. Brusselars during my investigation of RBAC in summer of 2024, nor in fall of 2024 following the presentation of my findings of the pension disaster to the most powerful RBAC member, Sara Innamorato.
In fact, after Ms. Brusselars became a member of the RBAC in January 2024, the RBAC issued its 2024 Actuarial Report, dated as of November 6, 2024, that continued to utilize the unrealistically high 7.75% assumed investment rate of return, which, in turn, artificially decreased the magnitude of the RBAC’s pension debt. This same 7.75% assumed investment rate of return had been continually used by RBAC for many past years. But Ms. Brusselars, an active RBAC board member, never disputed the use of the 7.75% investment rate of return in the 2024 Actuarial Report nor demanded that the report be withdrawn.
So it wasn’t just “past board members continually over estimated investment returns,” Ms. Brusselars did it too.
The RBAC’s own July 2026 report states: “Finally, [in 2025] the RBAC reduced the assumed rate of return from 7.75% to a more realistic 7%, an important transparency improvement which also had the effect of increasing the reported size of the unfunded liability.” It is estimated that using the 7.75% assumed rate of return in RBAC’s 2024 Actuarial Report, rather than 7%, probably under reported the pension debt by about $175 million.
According to data compiled by the National Association of State Retirement Administrators (NASRA), public retirement systems have steadily lowered their rates over the past decade. By 2023, the national median dropped to 7.0%, making a 7.75% rate exceptionally rare and on the absolute highest end for municipal assumptions across the country. RBAC’s use of the 7.75% rate in the 2024 Actuarial Report was an outlier, and the only large Pennsylvania public pension plan to use it.
It should be noted, RBAC reduced its assumed investment rate of return to from 7.75% to 7% in 2025, only after I made it an issue in the December 2024 lawsuit I filed to protect the pension fund victims.
RBAC has lost hundreds of millions of dollars on flim-flam private equity schemes leaving only about $800 million of liquid assets in the pension fund. If you will, this $800 million represents the diminishing pension piggy bank from which annual pension cash deficits of around $55 million per year must be paid.
And, the cash deficit will keep growing. The cash demands will increase by about $7 million per year. In the past, RBAC defrayed the cash gap by taking more money from the County employees’ gross pay. However, now that RBAC withholds a backbreaking 11% of the County employees’ gross pay, this can no longer be done.
Allegheny County needs competent pension management and not spin artists. That is why I have asked County Council members to perform their fiduciary duties to protect the pension fund, County employees, and County taxpayers. No doubt, it will take political courage to do so.
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The Allegheny County District Attorney’s Office serves approximately 1.2 million people and is one of the largest jurisdictions in the United States of America at 740 sq. miles. It employs over 200 employees, including over 100 attorneys, detectives, crime scene analysts and support staff. The District Attorney’s Office serves as the Chief Law Enforcement Office of the county and accepts referrals from more than 100 active police departments, including the City of Pittsburgh Bureau of Police, the Allegheny County Police Department and the Allegheny County Sheriff’s Department. For more information, visit alleghenycountyda.us.
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