CalPERS adopts standard reporting for GPs

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System has adopted a standardised reporting system for its general partners. Each of the $236 billion pension system’s general partners and funds of funds managers will have to begin using the standardised forms come this March.  

CalPERS’ new distribution and capital call sheets were adapted from those created by Institutional Limited Partners Association, which released its templates for the industry in October. 

“We adapted that template to our own purposes,” said CalPERS spokesman Wayne Davis in an interview. “We think it helps a great deal in handling risk management compliance and our ability to track all our funds and our managers … We’re doing this for us, specifically, and what we think is best for our fund and managing our portfolio.” 

According to ILPA, standardised reporting templates and practices reduce management costs, improve communication between LPs and GPs and expedite legal and investment processes. 

CalPERS is one of private equity’s most prominent limited partners, having committed around $50 billion to the asset class. The retirement system’s endorsement of ILPA’s reporting guidelines for its own massive portfolio could create momentum for the effort to standardise practices industry-wide, an effort that has been aided by LPs’ growing demands for transparency on the part of their fund managers. 

CalPERS is the first LP to publicly endorse the templates, though several others have already reached out to their GPs about adopting them, ILPA executive director Kathy Jeramaz-Larson told sister publication Private Equity International.

“It was very collaborative with GPs and LPs,” Jeramaz-Larson said, describing how the organisation assembled the templates. “We believe that they are very adoptable.” 

ILPA’s recording templates include information on realised and unrealised investments, including fund ownership percentage, total invested, current cost, reported value (and changes to valuations), realised proceeds and internal rates of return. 

Other checklist information includes detailed statistics about the portfolio company, period changes in valuations, LP ownership percentage and internal rate of return since inception.