If I take payment from someone, promise something and don't deliver, that's fraud.  So how come companies can take pension contributions from employees, promise pension benefits and then just renege without any repercussions to the companies or their overpaid management?  How can they just avoid paying legally-mandated severance pay and get away with it?  Companies should be required to fully-fund their pension and severance liabilities (i.e. maintain assets equal to their liabilities and keep them separate from company assets) at all times.  As it is, if there's a shortfall in pension funding they are only required to develop a plan to get back to full funding eventually (they seldom do), and the regulators just go along with it.  As a former employee of a pension regulator, I was always amazed at this officially-sanctioned fraud.  If nothing else, pension and severance liabilities should at least be first on the list of priorities for payment upon company dissolution.