The plethora of class action lawsuits against colleges and universities over their 403(b) plans have brought a variety of settlements and wins by the defendant schools.
Add Vanderbilt University to the universities that settled up and paid upon a lawsuit against them. Vanderbilt has agreed to fork over $14 million as a settlement for the class action lawsuit.
The lawsuit had claimed that the fiduciaries of the plans breached their fiduciary duties by locking the plan into a CREF stock account and into the services of a certain recordkeeper (TIAA, which was the TIAA of TIAA-CREF); breaching their fiduciary duties by paying unreasonable administrative fees; engaging in prohibited transactions by paying excessive administrative fees; breaching their fiduciary duties by agreeing to unreasonable investment, management, and other fees and failing to monitor imprudent investments; engaging in prohibited transactions by paying fees to certain third parties in connection with the plan’s investment in those parties’ investment options (see TIAA-CREF above); and failing to monitor other fiduciaries.
