Lateefah Simon: “It will be a great disappointment but I will only speak about 5 minutes on this amendment. I offer this amendment on…”

“It will be a great disappointment but I will only speak about 5 minutes on this amendment. I offer this amendment on behalf of Senator Jeffords and myself, an amendment that does not have anything to do with aviation, but we need a vehicle on a bill that is eminently sound and is really needed. Mr. President, we have right now $3 trillion worth of pension funds that are backed by ERISA. Of those $3 trillion, better than $2 billion, almost $2.1 billion, are adequately audited. The GAO and the inspector general of the Department of Labor say that we should do away with what is called the limited scope audit. Now, what is a limited scope audit? A limited scope audit permits a bank or an insurance company simply to sign a statement to a pension fund, saying we have $300 million in assets, period. This bill does away with that because we have $950 billion worth of taxpayer funds at risk if we do not modify this. That is what GAO tells us and this bill is what GAO has recommended. Let me just add, this does not require the pension fund to go in an audit. I assume a bank or an insurance company will have their own auditor. This simply says we need an audit report, not simply a one-line statement saying that they have so many million dollars in assets.”