03.14.22

DOL's Ali Khawar Says Participants' Best Interests Is Still Priority

by: Brian Croce

Although the Department of Labor's environmental, social and governance (ESG) and proxy voting proposal is more "favorable" to ESG investing, the responsibility for plan fiduciaries to make financial decisions in their participants' best interests remains paramount, Ali Khawar, acting head of the agency's Employee Benefits Security Administration, said at a Monday conference. While plan fiduciaries can care about ESG issues, "ERISA's framework is focused on the financial benefit for participants and beneficiaries," said Khawar. "And so I wanted to make clear that the proposal, that even though it was more favorable and more encouraging in some ways of ESG investing, that we weren't coming across as telling people that those things were more important than thinking about retirement security, because they're not."

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