When trying to explain United Airlines' recent pension default, various analysts and assorted lawmakers often use the phrase "perfect storm," suggesting that an unstoppable combination of impersonal economic forces blindsided the carrier. It's a faulty metaphor. Some of United's problems may have been due to avoidable waste and human greed. Congress should take heed, for the sake of the 44 million American workers who are covered by pensions similar to United's.

A recent report by The Times's Mary Williams Walsh documents the likelihood that the United employees who collectively lost $3.4 billion in benefits in the default weren't simply the victims of a bad stock market and low interest rates. From 1999 through 2003, Labor Department records show, some 30 money managers, consultants and other professionals that handled United's pensions earned at least $125 million, paid out of plan assets. During that same period, a huge gap opened between the value of the pensions' assets and the amount owed to present and future retirees - from a surplus of about $2 billion to a deficit of nearly $7 billion. The record is silent on how individual money managers performed, making it impossible to determine who may have acted in a way that contributed to the pensions' failures.

Even though the federal government is the ultimate insurer for failed pensions, the world of pension investing is largely unregulated. In United's case, that system allowed money managers to make risky bets that included junk bonds, dot-com stocks and, apparently, an Albanian energy venture. A pension auditor told Ms. Walsh that many pension money managers favor actively traded equities, in part because they generate fees and commissions that can be shared with pension consultants who steer business their way. The auditor's observation is supported by a report released last May by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It found that more than half of the consultants who helped pension funds invest their money had outside business relationships that could taint their advice.

Congress and the Labor Department, which oversees the federal pension agency, should swiftly investigate the allegations of conflicts of interest and, if warranted, seek redress for bilked workers and retirees. So far, Congress hasn't broached the topic, and the Labor Department has been unresponsive to a written request from one of United's unions, sent in June, for an audit of United's pensions. There's no excuse for foot-dragging. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the federal pension insurer, is straining under the weight of $63 billion in liabilities. If it should ever collapse, American taxpayers would be the payers of last resort.

Congress should also impose rules to limit aggressive pension investments and to charge higher pension-insurance premiums to companies that engage in risky investing. Lawmakers have long resisted such interventions, mainly on the grounds that they would distort the free market. That's backward. Government regulation is less distorting than investors' misbehavior, that dreaded "moral hazard" - which is unleashed when investors take undue risks because they are protected by insurance and, in the case of pensions, shielded from having to disclose their performance. And charging higher insurance premiums to high-risk clients is simply common sense.

Rather than a perfect storm, the United pension debacle may be the tip of an iceberg.