Public Pension "No Stable Funding", warns official
The Public Employees' Retirement System of Mississippi closed fiscal year 2026 with a 17.11% investment return and net assets of $40.34 billion, the system's chief investment officer told the PERS Investment Committee on Aug. 26. Minutes later, the board chairman read aloud a passage in the system's revised Investment Policy Statement stating that the fund has no stable funding mechanism.
The chief investment officer, identified in the meeting record as “Charles,” told the committee: “I'm here and pleased to report the system closed fiscal year 2026 with a 17.11% return.” He said the fund had outperformed its policy benchmark return of 16.63%, and that the result placed PERS “firmly in the top decile of public pension funds over 10 billion in assets for the fiscal year.”
Later in the same meeting, as trustees reviewed revised policy language on funding and asset allocation, the board chairman read from the revised Investment Policy Statement. “It says without a stable funding mechanism, the strategic asset allocation serves as a central framework for achieving the plan's long-term investment objectives,” he told the committee. He added that the passage “clearly states where we are and what our board … job is and where we have to work in the future with you and other … individuals.”
The acknowledgment appears in the fund's own governing document and was voiced by its board leadership rather than by an outside critic.
PERS's most recently published figures, for fiscal year 2025, put the system's funded ratio at 55.9% and its unfunded accrued liability at $27.0 billion, with net plan assets of $35.6 billion and a one-year investment return of 11.66%. The fiscal 2026 return and the $40.34 billion net asset value reported Wednesday have not yet appeared in a published PERS valuation or annual report.
PERS administers retirement benefits for state and local public employees in Mississippi. The revised Investment Policy Statement was before the Investment Committee for review at the Aug. 26 meeting.