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Altria Group 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options

Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $4.06bn of the $4.09bn in the Altria Group plan votes in secret. Fidelity 500 Index Fund, the most common fund in the plans we track, publishes every vote: answer 3 of its ballots, then see your result.

The question on the ballot

As filed

The Altria Group 401(k) holds $4.09bn. Of the $4.06bn we could identify from the plan’s own filing, every dollar sits in a fund that publishes no record of how it voted your shares — collective trusts, which unlike a mutual fund file no Form N-PX and leave no public trace of a single vote.

SourceAltria Group’s own annual retirement-plan filing with the SEC (Form 11-K, Schedule of Assets) · open the filing

What the plan holdsVehicleVoting recordValue
Altria Client Services Deferred Profit-Sharing Master Trustlisted as “Master Trust n a” Collective trust or separate account NONE $3.11bn
Altria Client Services Deferred Profit-Sharing Trust for Altria Stocklisted as “Master Trust n a” Collective trust or separate account NONE $953m
Notes receivable from participantslisted as “Interest rates range from 3.25% to 9.50% Maturity dates through 2049 n a” Bonds No shares to vote $26m

The 3 largest holdings in the plan. “Vehicle” is the description the filing itself gives each investment.

Why there is nothing to show

A mutual fund has to file Form N-PX every year listing every vote it cast on your behalf. A collective investment trust does not. It is a bank-run vehicle sold only inside retirement plans, it is cheaper, and it is now where most 401(k) default money sits — including most target-date funds, which is where savers who never chose anything are put.

So the shares bought with Altria Group employees’ retirement savings are voted every proxy season — on executive pay, on board seats, on climate and workforce proposals — and there is no public document anywhere recording how. This is not an oversight by Altria Group; it is what the disclosure rules currently require, which is to say: nothing.

What you can do

Check whether your plan offers any registered fund as an alternative — those publish their records, and you can read them here. If it does not, the menu itself is the thing that has to change, and that is a decision made by the plan’s fiduciary committee, not by you alone.

See how funds that do publish voted →

CoverageWe classified 100% of this plan’s assets from the filing. The figure above is the share of the money we could classify; anything we could not identify is excluded from it rather than assumed either way.

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