I get what you're saying, mathlete, and you're right that I feel better about my investments with higher levels of regulation.
However, as someone who works in the financial services industry and is involved in SOX compliance activities, I can differentiate those actions from BS jobs very easily. I would suspect that most similarly situated US folks can, because SOX compliance work is painfully obvious as such. (It appears you're not in the US based on "whinge" and "appointed actuary", so I can understand how that might not be clear.)
As an example, I'm currently involved in a compliance issue involving not just SOX but state departments of insurance, which are FAR more willing to level fines than the SEC will ever be. To boil it down for lay readers, my group is required to track X, but we're not responsible for actually doing X, so we put in place a rule for the people who do that says "hey, if you do X, you must report it to us", so that we can take those reports and make the correct and compliant disclosures to all relevant regulatory bodies.
One of the people who do X decided that the requirement to report X didn't apply to them because Y. (This premise was always wrong.) They did not report X for several years. This came to light because of a compliance action, and we need to take remedial steps, all of which are more involved and time consuming than initially reporting X would be.
WHY would that person make that decision? Why not ask "hey, does Y have any bearing on reporting X"? Because that person has a 90% BS job, and at some level knows it. All of her actions based on the assumption that nothing she does actually matters. Which is fine for the 90% that doesn't, but not so good for the 10% that does?
So why does she have a job? Because humans are not rational economic actors. There is prestige in "headcount", so direct managers are loathe to eliminate jobs that report to them, particularly when that job would mean more work on their plate. As you go up the ladder, there's more incentive to eliminate wasted cost, but also less understanding of who is and is not adding value to the organization.
Which brings me to my final point. Adding value to a company is not the same as adding value to society. I believe that liability insurance, as one example, is overall a drain on society and as an industry should be greatly reduced. However, I am an expert in liability insurance, which provides value to my company, so they pay me.
If you have a DB plan, do you want an appointed actuary looking at it and giving their input? Or do you just want senior management to mark down whatever they want for liabilities in order to appease the BoDs and get their bonus?
If you believe that the actuarial tables are solely based on math and have no management influence at all, I have a bridge to sell you. The math just has to be defensible, and as a mathlete I would imagine you're familiar with how numbers can be manipulated to show a variety of different things. Actuarial analysis is as much an art as a science.