Australia's fund managers go to battle every day with the corporate elite. They hold company management to account and represent the interests of the ordinary investor sweating on their superannuation balance.

But the industry super funds, in line with their growing influence, are now asking for more from fund managers.

They want an answer to one of the last big mysteries in Australian financial services: what do fund managers get paid?

"It's got to be a level playing field across everyone," says the respected former fund manager Peter Morgan, who is now a private investor.

"Honestly, I've always said it's silly for fund managers to be voting on remuneration reports or having corporates at one level and them not being on the same level," he says, observing the practice as hypocritical. "It is a well rewarded industry ... It's right up there."

Fund managers are a key cog in the machine that disperses Australia's much-celebrated superannuation pile, which is headed towards $2 trillion. Fund management is not only about superannuation but retirement savings are easily the biggest part of the nation's total $2.3 trillion fund management industry. Based on current contribution rates and labour force trends, super's representation will swell to $3 trillion by 2020.

The super system is a chain of different organisations that encompasses insurers, asset consultants and fund managers.

When a super fund member makes a contribution to their retirement balance, part of it is deployed by the super fund into the hands of fund managers, who invest the money into shares, bonds or other kinds of securities. It is a good business to be in, with $20 billion of new money flowing in every year courtesy of compulsory superannuation.

The trappings of wealth are certainly there to be seen. There are the prestige homes, the yachts and astounding philanthropy.

Last year's BRW Rich 200 list featured seven men who had made personal fortunes from their investing talent. The cut-off to make the list in 2014 was a net worth of $250 million.

This is not about class envy. Nobody BusinessDay spoke to begrudges the maverick investors who created personal fortunes by backing themselves and building billion-dollar boutiques from scratch. Their genius has been equally rewarding for their clients.

But the industry has also created a generation of lesser-known stars that are not necessarily rich listers. They conduct their business below the radar but still earn eye-popping packages comparable with ASX200 chief executives. And remember, much of it is earned on the back of the ordinary Australian's superannuation.

The true extent of the rewards on offer is unknown. But those in the know suggest it might include a cut of revenue allocated to a specific investment strategy, there could be performance bonuses and or perhaps equity in the firm or dividends earned on that equity.

And when things do not go to plan, there is no evidence of clawbacks in the event of client losses.

There is an irony, critics say, that as the annual general meeting season rolls around in coming weeks, the fiercest of the fund manager bunch will have already hosted chairmen in their offices grovelling for proxy votes. And one of the areas of greatest concern is the votes on remuneration.

As an aside, it is worth noting that there is encouraging evidence that this special breed of stockpickers are turning activist, wielding their influence to oust lazy management and bring attention to corporate ineptitude in the interest of better investor returns.

But on the accountability scales, fund managers themselves are under-represented.

Industry Super Australia, which represents the not-for-profit super funds such as AustralianSuper or UniSuper, has proposed a system-wide disclosure regime that would apply to fund managers.

ISA is now calling for the disclosure of pay details for directors, key executives and the highest-paid employees of funds management companies. It also recommends identifying the names of directors, their backgrounds and qualifications, and attendance record for board and committee meetings.

Industry Super ultimately wants a disclosure regime comparable with the demands of companies listed on the stock exchange.

David Whiteley from Industry Super says that at heart the issue is about the ability of members to "open up the bonnet and have a good look at how the super system actually works".

"This is a compulsory system. Let's be very clear, it's a major economic success for Australia ... but in requiring 9.5 per cent of people's wages to go into this super system, it's actually somewhat odd that someone can't get the information they want about how the fees they're paying are being spent."

But not everybody agrees that there is a meaningful public interest benefit in telling people how much fund managers get paid.

One expert watching the debate play out posed the question: if you knew what your doctor earned, would your treatment be any better?

The same argument, of course, could be made about public company chief executives, should they not be simply judged on their results. And yet the fund managers will be there at the microphone on AGM day, lashing companies who pay too much, not just those who fail to deliver results.

The Financial Services Council, whose membership includes the big four banks which offer retail super funds and investment managers, does not agree there is a case to mandate the disclosure of fund manager remuneration because all the consumer research it has conducted suggests members are not interested in these details.

"Those are very esoteric fees − a member doesn't pay those directly. Rather, the member pays an investment fee to a super fund," Andrew Bragg, FSC's director of policy, says.

The FSC also highlights the competitive nature of the marketplace and competition's role in keeping fees for investment management low. Super choice also means that members dissatisfied with their fees can switch to another fund if they want to, even though Australians have a proven record of setting and forgetting when it comes to their super fund.

"What's most important to a member is the total fee they pay. If a super fund is paying $5 or $5 million to a fund manager, it's immaterial [to the member]. What matters is net returns. At the end of the day we're here to provide retirement income for people," Bragg says.

The average fee paid by a member is 1.1 per cent annually of their super balance.

The FSC points to MySuper: the new default fund model where members can see how their dollars were deployed along the lines of what went to investment fees, insurance fees, administration and advice fees.

And it argues that a study of the Chilean retirement income system, which is comparable with the Australian model, shows that Australian members of super funds in MySuper-compliant products get value for money.

While investment fees were noticeably higher – almost twice that of MySuper's Chilean counterparts – that reflected the greater allocation to fixed income assets in the South American country.

(Equities are the dominant asset class in Australia, a reality that the system cannot find an easy workaround for.)

The administrative component of fund fees was similar in both countries.

Respected stockpicker Morgan, who used to head equities at Perpetual before running his own boutique 452 Capital, quit professional funds management a few years ago. He is open about the apparent double-standard of disclosure that few of his peers are willing to address publicly.

As one doyenne of funds management replied in response to BusinessDay's inquiry: "Thanks but no thanks."

Still, Morgan's belief is that administration fees are high and this needs to be addressed alongside the disclosure challenge.

"Number one, transparency should be there, and the pressure on fees should also be there," he says.

The legislated nature of contributions and their trillion-dollar growth profile adds a greater impetus to protect the retirement pool and keep it out of the hands of gougers.

"That's why it has to have checks and balances, it has to be properly regulated and it has to have proper transparency," Morgan emphasises, suggesting that better disclosure would also take some of the pressure off regulators, if anything.

Morgan points to how the evolution of annual reports lifted the standards for governance by Australian companies.

As with all reform, "It's better to do it now while markets are booming than to be chasing your tail".

There is a another player in the debate which some even argue has a bigger role to play.

The rise of passive managers is providing some level of accountability.

These passive managers, such as index funds, offer exposure to the sharemarket at low cost. They simply structure their portfolio to mirror the composition of an index rather than trying to pick out the winners or losers.

These index managers are keeping active managers – the industry label for stockpickers – on their toes.

This is because a greater awareness is spreading of active managers who deliver passive performance, despite their claims of being able to pick winners, but charge as if they were delivering superior returns.

Passive performance would be a return comparable with the benchmark index. Active performance is, in effect, anything better than that.

The latest Mercer survey of Australia's long-only fund managers shows that the median share manager delivered a return over the 12 months to August of 15 per cent, beating the S&P/ASX 300 Index return of 14.1 per cent.

Over a quarter, the results are less flattering. The median Australian share manager produced a 3.4 per cent return, failing to beat the market's 3.6 per cent.

Looking at three- and five-year performance, stockpickers have it better: the median manager has outperformed the market by 1.4 per cent and 0.6 per cent respectively.

Morgan argues that index funds are an imperfect fit in the Australian market because of the banks and miners, which dominate the ASX 200. In the US, the benchmark is more evenly split between sectors, so the returns are more in the spirit of passive management.

"When you start going down the passive side here in Australia, you run into all sorts of trouble in terms of index weights," he says.

And the rise of the big industry funds, such as AustralianSuper, "have become the AMPs and National Mutuals of the late 1980s and '90s", such is their scale in their home market. "The challenge is to resist the pull of passive-style returns for these giant funds, possibly by venturing overseas. It's just a fact of life with superannuation growing as big as it is," he says.

Some fund managers are more open than others about what the so-called brains trust earns.

Platinum Asset Management, for example, counts two members of the Rich 200 in its ranks – Kerr Neilson and Andrew Clifford.

Neilson is, on paper, worth more than $3 billion, while Clifford is worth a relatively more modest $255 million.

Almost all of their net worth, however, is tied up in Platinum equity, which implies that they benefited not from the salaries and bonuses drawn from their employers but skin in the game.

All public companies can choose who their key management personnel are.

Australia's largest independent fund manager, Perpetual, with about $30 billion in funds under management, does not tell us what the investment managers earn. The investment team do not have roles running the company, and historically this has not been an issue warranting criticism by Perpetual's shareholders.

But perhaps for a funds management company, an equally important disclosure question concerns retention as opposed to remuneration, because the stockpickers themselves are critical to the company's success. That means posing the question "what is the company doing to keep its stars", not "what is the company paying them".