Private Pensions: Publicly Available Reports Provide Useful but Limited Information on Plans' Financial Condition;Report to the Congress

摘要

Information about the financial condition of defined benefit pension plans is provided in two sources: regulatory reports to the government and corporate financial statements. The two sources can often appear to provide contradictory information. GAO was asked to explain and describe (1) key differences between the two publicly available sources of information (2) the limitations of information about the financial condition of defined benefit plans from these two sources; and (3) recent or proposed changes to pension reporting, including selected approaches to pension reporting used in other countries.