According to David Soares, a retired prosecutor and one of 732,000 pension-drawing former employees of the state of California, something is very rotten in his state’s pension system.

The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), which manages the benefits for more than 1.6 million state employees, retirees, and their families, is the nation’s largest public pension fund, with nearly half a trillion dollars of assets under its management. Soares and other retirees’ pensions depend on the investments CalPERS makes with that money, and he’s worried by the fact that increasingly, the fund has been investing those dollars in private equity firms.

As he noted with concern, “There’s just been this explosion of paying fees to private equity.”