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Southern 401(k) retirement plan: the investment options
Does your 401(k) vote the way you would? $6.04bn of the $10.25bn in the Southern 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 Southern 401(k) holds $10.25bn. Of the $6.04bn 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.
SourceSouthern’s own annual retirement-plan filing with the SEC (Form 11-K, Schedule of Assets) · open the filing
| What the plan holds | Vehicle | Voting record | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Southern Companylisted as “Common Stock **” | Directly held shares | Voted by the plan trustee | $3.13bn |
| Vanguard Institutional 500 Fundlisted as “Common collective trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $2.34bn |
| BlackRock EAFE Equity Fundlisted as “Common collective trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $1.30bn |
| BlackRock Russell 2000 Fundlisted as “Common collective trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $939m |
| Variouslisted as “Self-directed accounts **” | Brokerage window | Whatever the saver buys | $937m |
| Northern Trust Coll Aggr Bond Index Fund IIlisted as “Common collective trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $929m |
| Short-term Investment Fundlisted as “Common collective trust **” | Collective trust or separate account | NONE | $526m |
| Participantslisted as “Loan to participants, with interest ranging from 3.25 % to 10.50 % **” | Participant loans | No shares to vote | $140m |
| BIF Money Fundlisted as “Money Market Fund **” | Money-market fund | PUBLISHED | $4m |
The 9 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 Southern 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 Southern; 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.
Other employer plans
The largest employer plans on the site, and a few more. Each page shows what the plan’s funds did with the shares its savers paid for.