At least eight PSERS executives worked for three weeks to craft a reply to board member Joe Torsella. They said they wre comprehensive and substantive.

When the top staff of Pennsylvania’s biggest pension fund was asked about board member Joe Torsella, a gadfly who pushed relentlessly for change at the $73 billion plan, they complained that Torsella didn’t trust them and even called him “intractable” in a public statement.

Now a new set of previously private fund emails further documents the PSERS fund management’s attitude toward former State Treasurer Torsella and how it dealt with him.

The messages, released in response to a Right-To-Know filing by The Inquirer, were exchanged among top executives of PSERS, the mammoth Public School Employees’ Retirement System, as they circled the wagons to respond to Torsella about the fund’s finances. He and other critics have long maintained that the system’s performance has lagged compared with other public funds.

In July 2020, Torsella put his finger on something very odd in the fund’s official reports. Suddenly, the plan was booking $150 million more in assets from five years before than it had previously put down on its books. Torsella questioned this surprising discovery in a pointed letter to PSERS.

In time, it would become all too clear that Torsella had uncovered an issue that would metastasize into a major scandal for the fund.

But back in 2020, at least eight PSERS executives worked for three weeks on a reply to Torsella,...

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