This is part of my reasoning for wanting allot of personal control over my own money...
"Nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own."
"Nobody uses somebody else's resources as carefully as he uses his own."
"So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property."
-- Milton Friedman
There are competing interests here. The employer wants control of the money for two reasons.
First, if the employee fritters the money away, the employer may feel an obligation to provide for them anyway. Also, the employee may not be able to retire when the employer wants them to.
Second, the defined benefit plan allows the employer to provide relatively higher benefits to the long-serving employee.
Freegards