@OP this started the beginning of the end for Brown Duckett & her lackeys. This report from NBC in 2024. This combined with the allegations in the Marcella Gift recent lawsuit has shined such a bright light on ethics, morals, and leadership that it will be impossible to recover from:
Gretchen Morgenson
NBC in 2024
$18.2 million in pay
In an effort to ensure its clients make changes the tool recommends, last year TIAA began a new incentive setup, the complaint contends. While previously consultants had been encouraged to discuss the tool’s recommendations with clients, now the employees are tasked with getting a certain number of clients to implement the tool’s advice. If a consultant persuades at least 170 customers to make changes using the tool, he or she earns credits toward bonuses accounting for one-quarter of their compensation.
TIAA said it has minimum performance standards and goals for its financial consultants “to ensure consistency in participant experience and that baseline expectations of the role are achieved.”
Top TIAA executives also reap rewards when more money flows into its annuity, the company’s compensation report shows. Almost half of the pay granted to TIAA’s top executives last year — 45% — was based on the firm’s financial performance; growth in inflows to TIAA Traditional is one of five measures the firm’s human resources committee uses to determine that.
Pay at the top of TIAA is generous. Together, its top five executives received $46.2 million last year, with Duckett, TIAA’s CEO, receiving $18.2 million, up from $17.5 million the prior year. Of the 18 companies TIAA considered to be peers for pay purposes last year, Duckett received more than CEOs at 10 of them, including Bank of New York Mellon, Equitable Holdings and T. Rowe Price.
Put another way, TIAA, which operates without profit, paid its CEO more than the CEOs at most of the for-profit companies it says are peers.
TIAA’s spokesman said that Duckett’s compensation was set by the TIAA board of trustees based on the company’s performance.
The recent push to increase client usage of TIAA’s advice tool appears to be succeeding. Last fall, TIAA executives sent a congratulatory email to financial consultants noting that “advice implementations” using the tool were up 34% year over year, a copy shows. More than $400 million in new money flowed to TIAA Traditional as a result, the email said.
While TIAA’s in-house products generate significant revenues and profits to the firm, it’s not always so for clients. Last year, for example, the TIAA real estate offering was down 13.6%; it is down 4.7% year to date.
Other real estate funds have done better. One managed by Cohen & Steers is up 9.35% for the past 12 months and averaged a 5.8% gain in each of the past five years. Here’s how these returns affect investors: If a plan participant had invested $15,000 in the TIAA offering and added $100 each month, she would have generated about $60,000 over the past 15 years. If she invested $15,000 in the Cohen & Steers fund and contributed an additional $100 each month, she would have had $151,000.
TIAA says its real estate product offers “potentially lower volatility” than other investments in the sector and “guaranteed, daily liquidity.”
‘Somebody stood up’
Until now, Fitzpatrick, the previous TIAA whistleblower, has not spoken publicly about his experience helping the SEC and New York state investigation. TIAA declined to comment on Fitzpatrick’s allegations, which NBC News shared with the firm. In a phone interview, Fitzpatrick recalled joining TIAA in 2013 because the firm said it held itself to a higher standard than other Wall Street outfits and always did what was in its clients’ best interests. “That’s all I wanted from an employer,” he said.
Early on, he brought in a $5.3 million account and was the top performer among TIAA’s new hires nationwide, he said. But he soon learned that his superiors were unhappy because he had not placed the client in a high-fee TIAA-managed account.
“I got into big trouble, but that’s not what the client wanted,” Fitzpatrick recalled. “That’s when I knew TIAA is not what it appears to be.”
His bosses put Fitzpatrick on a performance improvement plan, he said, and he knew his days were numbered. He left TIAA about a year after he joined and began working in the development office of the Milwaukee School of Engineering. In early 2017, he started providing information to regulators investigating TIAA.
“We had training materials and emails to show what was going on, and we also had evidence of bonus plans and how they worked,” Fitzpatrick recalled. “If you looked carefully, you could see there was a clear conflict of interest, and they were not disclosing it.”
Then began what Fitzpatrick described as a long, quiet waiting game.
Ted Fitzpatrick at his home in Glendale, Wis., on July 10.Caleb Alvarado for NBC News In 2024, seven years after he started working with regulators, Fitzpatrick received an award for helping with the 2021 case. He declined to say how much he received but said the amount was “not life-changing.” Referring to TIAA, he added: “I would have made more money if I’d done what they wanted.”
Today Fitzpatrick works at a hardware store mixing paint. “I was at a point in my life when I didn’t need to worry about the impact on my career,” he said of his decision to help regulators. He said he has run into a few professors who were TIAA clients and when they discovered he’d blown the whistle, they thanked him.
“That’s very gratifying,” he recalled. “They said, ‘I’m so glad that somebody stood up.’”