B.C. PENSION PEN GIANT IN SEC COMPLIANCE COMPL OVERSIGHT.

B.C. Investment Management

One of Canada's largest pension funds “inadvertently omitted” all of its Canadian holdings from a recent disclosure it made to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, failing to include about US$2.46 billion in investments.

British Columbia Investment Management Corp. made the omission in February, when it submitted its disclosures for the three months ended Dec. 31. The pension fund, which has $145.6 billion in assets under management, failed to disclose holdings in 98 companies, primarily across Canada's energy, banking and mining sectors. The Canadian holdings accounted for more than 20 per cent of its total disclosed investments.

BCI, which manages the pensions of B.C.'s public sector workers, said it only discovered that it had omitted these investments following inquiries from the Financial Post about its disclosed holdings in Canadian energy companies, which appeared to decline to zero in the final quarter of 2018.

“As a result of your query, we have discovered that the holdings you listed were inadvertently omitted from the filing,” BCI Director of Corporate Communication Gwen-Ann Chittenden said in an email.

A second look at the disclosure revealed that names BCI has consistently disclosed owning for years such as Toronto Dominion Bank, Canadian National Railway and Rogers Communications Inc. were also missing.

More than two weeks later, BCI corrected the errors in its Dec. 31 filing with an amendment. The errors, BCI said, were a result of a “data filter” that “omitted Canadian-domiciled inter-listed securities.”