Treasurer Garrity, Former Treasurer Torsella File Brief Supporting Trustee Access to PSERS Documents
Harrisburg, PA - Treasurer Stacy Garrity and former Treasurer Joe Torsella today filed an amicus brief supporting the rights of members of the Board of Trustees for the Pennsylvania School Employees Retirement System (PSERS) to access documents related to the performance of their duties.
Garrity and Torsella, who both serve on the PSERS Board of Trustees, said the filing was necessary to protect the ability of all board members to have access to documents and other records from PSERS which are necessary for them to fulfill their fiduciary duty to fund beneficiaries.
As stated in the brief, the current and former state treasurers took “the extraordinary step to present their views independently to this Court in order to protect the institutional rights of trustees to request, receive, and inspect PSERS records and documents necessary to inform themselves and intelligently perform their oversight responsibility.”
Later in the brief, Garrity and Torsella explain that “[b]y requesting this Court to create a legal precedent that would impose, for the first time in the Commonwealth, subject matter and time limitations on informational requests of corporate directors, the PSERS board threatens core institutional oversight functions of independent fiduciary trustees for all Pennsylvania corporations.”
The filing was made in the case of The Honorable Katie J. Muth v. PSERS, which is pending in the Commonwealth Court. A full copy is available here; the attachments are available here.
