The OPERS Cummins stake got bigger. Ohio’s largest public pension system increased its holding from 50,869 Cummins shares to 60,376 during the second quarter of 2026, leaving more than $43 million of public retirement money sitting in the diesel giant. Behind that tidy filing sits a much less comfortable allocation table: more than $522 million paid to external asset managers in 2025, $287 million of it attached to private equity, a private-equity portfolio that missed its benchmark, old litigation over access to alternative-investment records, and health-care changes affecting more than half a million current and future retirees. The worker gets the deduction. The retiree gets the adjustment. The manager gets the fee. Cummins gets more fucking shares.
The OPERS Cummins Stake Got Bigger
The Public Employees Retirement System of Ohio reported 60,376 Cummins shares worth $43,060,767 at the end of the second quarter of 2026. Three months earlier, OPERS held 50,869 shares worth roughly $27.37 million.
That means the position increased by 9,507 shares, or about 18.7%. So forget any automated headline suggesting OPERS suddenly discovered Cummins during the quarter. The SEC filings tell a more interesting story: Cummins was already sitting in the portfolio, and OPERS bought more.
That distinction matters. This was not some stale holding drifting through the books because nobody had bothered to touch it. The position grew. By the end of June, an Ohio public retirement system responsible for the financial security of public workers had more than $43 million sitting in a company carrying one of the largest environmental enforcement records in American corporate history.
Public employees contribute. OPERS allocates the money. Cummins appears on the statement.
Simple little chain.
Cut The Retirees
Now look at the language when the person on the other side of the spreadsheet is a retiree.
In January 2020, the OPERS Board approved major health-care changes that would take effect in 2022. Contemporary reporting said the changes would affect more than 500,000 current and future retirees.
Medicare-eligible retirees faced changes to monthly allowances, while OPERS also changed the structure available to pre-Medicare retirees and moved towards individual-market arrangements supported through Health Reimbursement Accounts.
OPERS had an actuarial argument. The system warned that without substantial changes, its health-care fund faced long-term sustainability problems and could eventually run out of money. Fine. A pension system cannot simply ignore arithmetic because the numbers are unpleasant. If a benefit structure becomes financially unsustainable, trustees have to deal with it.
But this is where the institutional contrast starts to get interesting.
When the numbers stop working for retirees, necessity walks into the room carrying an actuarial table. Benefits change, allowances move and individuals absorb the consequences because long-term sustainability demands discipline.
Keep that word handy.
Discipline.
We are going to need it on the investment side of the building.
Pay The Managers
OPERS’s financial reporting shows the system paid $522,637,405 in external asset-management fees during 2025.
More than half a billion dollars.
Private equity alone accounted for $287,353,802. That private-equity total included management fees, fund expenses and more than $112 million in performance fees connected to underlying investment arrangements.
Now, before anybody starts pretending TCAP cannot read accounts, these costs do not come from the exact same budget pot as retiree health-care allowances. Nobody here is claiming OPERS cancelled somebody’s medical allowance on Tuesday and wired the same money to a private-equity manager on Wednesday.
That would be bullshit.
The point is institutional rather than transactional.
When beneficiaries face reductions, the system explains sustainability, longevity and difficult choices. When investment management produces a bill exceeding half a billion dollars, that expense becomes part of the sophisticated machinery supposedly required to operate a giant pension fund.
The retiree gets an actuarial lesson.
The external manager gets an invoice approved.
Different columns. Same fucking institution.
$287 Million In Private Equity Fees, Then Miss The Benchmark
Perhaps the enormous private-equity fee line bought spectacular performance.
Not in 2025.
OPERS reports a private-equity portfolio worth roughly $16 billion. During 2025, it returned 8.45%.
The benchmark returned 10.09%.
So the private-equity portfolio missed its benchmark by approximately 1.64 percentage points while the associated external-manager costs ran into hundreds of millions of dollars.
For completeness, OPERS had a strong year overall. Its Defined Benefit Fund returned around 14.7% during 2025, comfortably above its actuarial target. TCAP is not going to turn one underperforming asset class into a fictional story that the entire pension portfolio collapsed into a flaming crater.
It did not.
That makes the private-equity line more interesting, not less.
The wider fund performed strongly. Yet this particular multibillion-dollar sleeve missed its own benchmark while generating an external-management bill of $287.4 million. Even more strikingly, more than $112 million of the private-equity fee line fell under performance fees.
Again, precision matters. Those fees arise from individual fund agreements and underlying manager structures. They do not mean OPERS simply handed somebody $112 million as a prize for missing the overall private-equity benchmark.
The actual numbers are already ugly enough.
Public retirement money goes in. Private managers take their contractual slice. The aggregate portfolio misses its benchmark.
Then another annual report comes out and everybody gets to admire the formatting.
The Fee Waterfall Never Retires
This is where public pensions become fascinating machines.
A worker understands the contribution because it disappears from the pay packet. A retiree understands the pension because it arrives in the bank account. Between those two points sits an investment structure so large and technically dense that hundreds of millions of dollars can move through management fees, performance fees and fund expenses while almost nobody outside the industry can picture what those numbers actually mean.
That complexity is not inherently sinister. OPERS manages enormous sums of money across global markets, and specialised investment management costs money.
But complexity is also where scrutiny goes to die of boredom.
A $287 million private-equity fee line becomes percentages, mandates, vintages, commitments, benchmarks and fee structures until eventually the ordinary public employee whose wages supplied the capital is expected to nod politely and trust that somebody smarter has checked the maths.
Maybe they have.
Shareholder Spotlight exists because sometimes it is worth checking what else sits in the fucking spreadsheet.
Today, that includes Cummins.
Public Money, Private Curtains
Alternative investments have also created transparency disputes around OPERS.
In 2019, former journalist John Damschroder pursued public records connected to OPERS alternative-investment vehicles, including investments involving Glouston Capital Partners. The dispute reached the Ohio Supreme Court before the parties later resolved the litigation through mediation.
That case did not establish corruption.
It does not need to.
What it exposed was a structural tension baked into modern public pension management. Public money moves into private-market structures, while the structures themselves often come wrapped in confidentiality, proprietary information and restrictions on what the pension can disclose.
The worker sees the pension contribution leaving the wage packet. The pension fund sees an allocation. The private manager sees commercially sensitive information.
Then the public asks what it actually owns and discovers that transparency occasionally comes with lawyers attached.
Public money.
Private curtain.
That is one hell of a financial magic trick.
Even OPERS Started Pulling Back
OPERS has itself recognised some of the difficulties surrounding private markets and adjusted its allocation strategy.
By late 2025, the system was moving to reduce its long-term private-equity target amid difficult market conditions. High valuations, weaker distributions and a slower environment for exits and mergers had made the asset class less attractive at the margin.
Again, that is not evidence of scandal. It is evidence that private equity comes with trade-offs that the glossy return charts never quite capture. The money can stay locked up for years, valuations are less transparent than publicly traded securities, and manager selection matters enormously because the gap between excellent and terrible private-equity funds can be enormous.
Meanwhile, the fee structure keeps breathing.
The investor waits for distributions. The manager waits for exits. The portfolio waits for a better market.
The invoice somehow never gets fucking stage fright.
Then Somebody Forged Their Way To $257,036
August 2026 produced another OPERS story from a completely different corner of the system.
The Ohio Auditor released a special audit concerning former Franklin County employee Jonathan McPheters, who fraudulently obtained OPERS disability payments using falsified medical documentation.
Investigators found forged documents submitted in 2018, 2021 and 2024. Between May 2018 and September 2024, McPheters received 77 fraudulent payments totalling $257,036.
He later pleaded guilty to aggravated theft and tampering with records and received community control alongside a restitution order.
Be completely clear about what that means.
OPERS was the victim of the fraud.
The pension system did not direct it, benefit from it or knowingly approve forged records.
It still belongs in the institutional picture because it shows another end of the machinery. While investment teams deal in billions and external management costs run into hundreds of millions, fraudulent disability paperwork managed to keep generating payments for more than six years before the system finally caught up.
Eventually investigators find the documents. Eventually the auditor writes the report. Eventually the ledger gets corrected.
That word does a lot of work in large institutions.
Eventually.
Then OPERS Bought More Cummins
Now return to the decision that brought the pension system into Shareholder Spotlight.
Cummins.
Between March and June 2026, OPERS increased its Cummins holding by 9,507 shares. At quarter end, the system owned 60,376 shares worth $43.06 million.
Cummins, meanwhile, continues to carry the record from its vehicle-emissions settlement involving allegations over defeat devices and undisclosed emissions-control software in Ram trucks. The settlement carried $1.675 billion in civil penalties, alongside recall and environmental mitigation obligations.
That enforcement record was not hidden. It was not whispered through some secret corporate grapevine.
It was announced by the fucking government.
Yet OPERS increased its position.
That is the Shareholder Spotlight hook in its cleanest form. Nobody has to allege a conspiracy or invent some secret relationship between Ohio and Indiana. The public filing says OPERS owned Cummins. The next public filing says it owned more.
Public workers supply the capital. OPERS makes the allocation. Cummins gets another 9,507 shares on the books.
Nothing illegal about it.
Nothing secret about it.
Nothing particularly pretty either.
Retirement Security Meets Diesel Exposure
OPERS exists to provide retirement security for public employees.
That mission should carry weight.
The people supplying the capital include workers who spent careers maintaining public infrastructure, keeping local government functioning, providing services and doing jobs that rarely come with a hedge-fund compensation package attached.
Their pension system therefore has a serious job: protect the money, grow it responsibly and make decisions capable of surviving decades of obligations.
That makes every major allocation a question of priorities.
OPERS decided Cummins deserved more capital during the second quarter of 2026.
At the same time, the pension system sits inside a much larger financial machine where beneficiaries have absorbed health-care changes, external investment-management costs exceed half a billion dollars, private equity consumes hundreds of millions in fees and that asset class recently missed its own benchmark.
None of those facts prove corruption.
The point is simpler.
The institution knows how to make difficult choices when retirees sit on one side of the equation.
Shareholder Spotlight is entitled to inspect the choices made when investment managers sit on the other.
Public Service, Private Fee Waterfalls
That is what makes OPERS more interesting than some cartoon scandal involving envelopes under a table.
There is no allegation here of pension trustees passing bags of cash around Columbus.
Instead, the tension is institutional.
Public workers fund the machine. Retirees depend on it. Private managers invoice it. Alternative assets disappear behind confidentiality structures. A multibillion-dollar private-equity portfolio can generate nine-figure external-management costs while missing its benchmark.
Meanwhile, fraudulent disability documents can survive inside another part of the system for years before detection.
Then OPERS buys more Cummins.
Nobody has to whisper.
Every important part of this story arrived through public paperwork.
That is considerably more useful.
Cummins Gets Another Pension Fund In The Ecosystem
Cummins does not exist in isolation.
It sits inside a network of investors, customers, suppliers, advisers and partners whose capital and commercial relationships help make the company look like another ordinary industrial institution.
OPERS is now part of that picture to the tune of more than $43 million.
Cummins knows there is a route by which the wider ecosystem stops getting dragged through this attention. It continues choosing the alternative.
Consequently, the shareholder list keeps becoming a research directory.
OPERS merely bought more.
Final Word : Cut The Retirees, Pay The Managers, Buy More Cummins
OPERS exists to provide security.
That should mean something.
Security means a public employee finishing decades of work and believing the institution holding the retirement money will make sensible, transparent decisions in the interests of the people who funded it.
Yet institutional security has a peculiar distribution.
When health-care finances looked unsustainable, more than half a million current and future retirees faced major changes. When external investment management sent its 2025 bill, the figure came to $522.6 million. Private equity accounted for $287.4 million of that.
When the private-equity portfolio reached year end, it returned 8.45% against a 10.09% benchmark. When members of the public sought deeper visibility into alternative investments, the dispute went far enough to reach the Ohio Supreme Court. When forged medical documents entered another part of the system, fraudulent disability payments continued until the total reached $257,036.
And when the second quarter of 2026 arrived, OPERS found room for 9,507 more Cummins shares.
The point is not that one pot directly funded another.
The point is who always seems to meet the hard arithmetic first.
The retiree gets the adjustment.
The manager gets the contract.
Cummins gets the capital.
Cut the retirees. Pay the managers. Buy more Cummins.
Quite a fucking retirement plan.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- SEC – OPERS Q2 2026 Form 13F Information Table
- SEC – OPERS Q1 2026 Form 13F Information Table
- OPERS – Financial Reports
- OPERS – Health Care Changes And Funding
- Beacon Journal – OPERS Health Benefit Changes Affecting More Than 500,000
- WOSU – Public Records Litigation Over OPERS Alternative Investments
- Markets Group – Ohio PERS Trims Private Markets Exposure
- Ohio Auditor of State – $257,036 OPERS Disability Benefit Fraud Special Audit
- EPA – 2024 Cummins Inc. Vehicle Emission Control Violations Settlement