It was 2015, the American economy seemed more or less healthy, but Jim DuCharme’s retirement savings at DST Systems were melting away as if the markets were in crisis.
Worst of all, there was nothing he could do but watch.
“The value of my plan dropped $120,000 from when I started paying attention to it until I finally was able to get out,” DuCharme told The Star recently.
Though it took DuCharme and others a while to figure it out, DST’s retirement plan was heavily invested in a company called Valeant Pharmaceuticals, a hot stock that was now plummeting amid scandal and federal investigations.
“The huge declines I was seeing on my plan statements were a direct result of what was happening to Valeant,” DuCharme said.
The alleged mismanagement of this plan would eventually become the subject of multiple lawsuits, including one filed by DuCharme in 2017. Five years later, he and other DST employees and retirees seeking restitution find themselves mired in a Kafkaesque legal morass that has seen DST’s legal team disagreeing with its own previous arguments and federal judges issuing diametrically opposed orders.
DST, which provided data processing services, was one of Kansas City’s largest employers for decades until being acquired by a competitor, SS&C, in 2018. DST offered its workers a retirement plan with two parts. One was a traditional 401(k) whose investments people like DuCharme could control. The other part was a profit-sharing plan, over which employees and...
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