Newly Obtained Amended IPERS Lawsuit Expands Allegations on Risk, Fees, and Benchmarking
A newly obtained amended IPERS filing sharply expands the allegations in Rich Wiggins’ case.
Editor’s note: What follows are allegations contained in a court filing. They are not proven facts.
A newly obtained amended petition in Polk County District Court sharply expands the allegations in former IPERS risk officer Rich Wiggins’ lawsuit against the State of Iowa.
The amended filing, e-filed Jan. 30, 2026 under LAW NO. LACL 163118, alleges flawed risk reporting, a benchmarking structure that made underperformance effectively impossible, understated management fees and expenses, and false bonus-related information submitted to a state board after Wiggins was fired.
That matters because recent public coverage of IPERS focused on the administrative leave of senior officials and vague references to “misconduct,” while giving the public little sense of what had already been laid — in detail — in the court record.
What Was Already on the Record
The earlier petition, filed in July 2025, alleged that Wiggins was hired in June 2022 as IPERS’ Investment Risk and Operations Officer and fired on Feb. 2, 2023 as a “bad fit” after raising concerns about risk reporting, a benchmarking process that allegedly “artificially creates alpha,” and the understatement of fees and expenses.
Wiggins was not a junior analyst questioning his superiors. Before joining IPERS, he served as head of risk and strategy for Saudi Aramco — the second-largest company in the world. He was hired specifically to ensure IPERS did not become, in his supervisors' own words, "the next Pennsylvania State Employees Retirement System" — a reference to the 2021 scandal involving overstated investment returns and an FBI investigation.
The original petition made clear that Wiggins was alleging more than an ordinary employment dispute. But the amended filing goes much further — and much more specifically.
What the Amended Petition Adds
In the amended petition, the allegations move from broad warning signs to a detailed description of how Wiggins says the system was being presented to decision-makers.
According to this filing, Wiggins alleges IPERS’ reporting was “riddled with errors” in three main areas: risk reporting, a benchmarking rubric that artificially created alpha, and the understatement of management fees and expenses.
On risk reporting: Wiggins alleges IPERS did not use any of the large risk software packages commonly employed by major state pension systems. Instead, the system relied on a small Illinois firm with no other clients of comparable size, using formulas developed by then-Chief Investment Officer Sriram Lakshminarayanan.
IPERS staff then graphed the output by hand in Microsoft Excel. When Wiggins requested the underlying algorithms and formulas, he was told they were unavailable. The Illinois vendor refused to provide them.
In the fall of 2022, Wiggins authored a memorandum recommending that IPERS bring in an outside consultant to verify the risk calculations. No response was received. He wrote a second memorandum. It was ignored.
Colleagues whom Wiggins shared some of the raw numbers with — experts in investment risk — agreed the output appeared visibly flawed and did not represent a robust measure of actual risk.
On benchmarking: The amended petition alleges that a large swath of the portfolio was benchmarked directly to itself — making it mathematically impossible to underperform. As the filing states: if IPERS' private equity, real estate, direct lending, opportunistic credit, and real assets all went to zero, the fund would still not underperform its benchmark, because the benchmark return was set to equal whatever those asset classes actually returned.
The filing characterizes this as, at best, "engineered outperformance" and, at worst, intentional misrepresentation.
Some strategies also allegedly introduced synthetic exposure to stocks and bonds benchmarked to cash — a mechanism that makes outperformance easy to show while introducing undisclosed leverage and obscuring real risk.
On fees: The petition alleges IPERS leadership frequently presented the plan as among the lowest-cost in the country. But the figures shown to the Investment Board excluded underlying private equity manager fees and incentives, and certain fees were structured so they were buried in transactional costs — preventing them from being itemized.
On post-termination conduct: The amended filing goes one step further. It alleges that after Wiggins was terminated, false information was submitted to a state board and money was subsequently requested in the form of bonuses. Under Iowa's False Claims Act (Iowa Code Chapter 685), Wiggins alleges that the use of inaccurate risk metrics and manipulated benchmarking to justify bonus requests constitutes the submission of false claims for compensation.
Those are allegations in a court pleading, not findings by a judge. But they are materially more specific than the version of the story most Iowans have seen so far.
A Filing the Public Never Really Saw
The filing also helps clear up some of the confusion surrounding the case itself. The amended petition identifies the matter as Rich Wiggins v. State of Iowa, filed in Polk County under LAW NO. LACL 163118. Wiggins is represented by Thomas J. Duff and Jim T. Duff of Duff Law Firm, P.L.C. The filing also shows copies to Jeffrey Peterzalek and Steven E. Blankinship for the State.
That level of detail matters on its own. It matters even more because most public coverage to date has focused on vague references to “misconduct” while leaving the substance of the court record largely unexplored.
This amended petition was e-filed on January 30, 2026 — two full months before IPERS CEO Gregory Samorajski and Chief Benefits Officer Steven Herbert were placed on administrative leave in the first week of April.
The timeline raises a question that no outlet has addressed: did the State's investigation begin before or after the amended filing landed? The public has not been told.
What the Public Was Told Instead
When the administrative leaves were announced, the governor's office issued a statement: “This situation does not pose any risk to the IPERS Trust Fund and does not impact the payment of benefits to members.”
That statement is narrowly true. IPERS is 92.7 percent funded. Benefits will continue to be paid.
But the statement does not address what is actually being alleged: that the numbers used to calculate that funding ratio may themselves be unreliable. If risk is understated, fees are concealed, and benchmarks are structured to guarantee the appearance of outperformance, then the system's reported financial health is an output of the very practices now under scrutiny — not an independent measure of it.
Nobody is saying retirees won't get their checks. The question is whether the people responsible for the $45 billion behind those checks were telling the truth about how it was being managed.
What Remains Unanswered
State officials have said senior IPERS officials were placed on leave pending an investigation. What remains unclear is who is conducting that investigation, what its scope is, and whether it overlaps with the allegations in the amended Wiggins filing.
This outlet has been tracking the IPERS story since August 2025, including reporting on pension privatization pressure from the Governor’s DOGE Task Force and a November memorandum of concern regarding potential conflicts of interest on the IPERS Investment Board. Those broader concerns remain separate questions. The amended Wiggins filing does not prove them. But it does establish that the public court record is more developed, and more serious, than recent coverage has suggested.
That is the significance of this filing. It does not prove the case overnight. It does strip away the fiction that the public had no way of knowing what the underlying allegations were. The amended petition exists. It is detailed. It is public. And it shows that the story surrounding IPERS is more serious than the state’s vague language — and much of the press coverage that followed it — has allowed the public to see.
The IPERS trust fund belongs to 424,000 Iowans — teachers, firefighters, corrections officers, state workers, and retirees who built careers on the promise of a secure retirement. They deserve more than reassurance. They deserve the actual record.
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Judas H Priest. Here is DOGE and 'Conservative Politics' in a nutshell. First you hollow out your public organization 'till it stumbles, then wear out any remaining, responsible public servants 'till they surrender or quit, and replace them with facile hacks, and then 'Privatise!': the clever coup de gras of self-governing, publicly responsible institutions. Then you and the chainsaw wielding grifter will get their 'appropriate' percentage.
It all reminds me of how very, very far we've fallen from George Bailey's intervention (and ideals) in the bank run scene from Frank Capra's film, "Wonderful Life" (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPkJH6BT7dM ) If it doesn't bring tears, I'd suggest having your ducts checked; but, to Mr. Tucker's point here,
These people (Koch's ALEC, et al ) have been working on this project for fifty years, and this bit of artful dodgery on the part of Koch, et al, and their wholly-owned subsidiaries in Des Moines leaves me just sputtering. I guess I was fortunate that my Iowa-related retirement moneys as city administrator were able to be deposited to the ICMA retirement fund, but I take small comfort in that. Their management is caught in the same vortex, along with all of us 'little people's' money.
Outstanding reporting and digging here, Mr. Tucker. It used to be that there'd have been a number of papers around the state that'd have dug into this, but Art Cullen's just one guy, and Old Man Potter's bought out everything else.
Tim Long, Just Up the Hill from Lock 15