Many employers claim that global competition and a volatile economy have forced to abandon pensions in favor of 401(k) plans, shifting the risk and most of the expense to employees. But Ellen Schultz, a former investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, says in her new book, “Retirement Heist: How Companies Plunder and Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers” (Portfolio, $26.95), that “companies have been largely responsible for the retirement crisis — and it was not an accident.” In her book, Schultz details how corporate pensions went from holding $250 billion in excess funds in the late 1990s to being collectively underfunded today. Surplus pension assets are supposed to remain in the plans to provide a cushion for the inevitable times when investment returns are weak and interest rates fall — like today. But years ago, employers persuaded Congress to relax the rules and let them use their overfunded pension plans to help cover other benefits, such as retiree health plans and early-retirement buyouts.

Although that might have sounded like a good idea at the time, it essentially allowed companies such as Verizon and General Motors to use pension assets to finance corporate downsizings. Others, such as IBM, moved hundreds of millions of dollars of executive pension liabilities into their rank-and-file pension plans without earmarking additional funds to pay for them. As a result, pension funds were severely depleted. Dramatic stock market losses did the rest.