Saturday, March 19, 2011

How lucrative are public pensions?

Have you ever watched a crime show where a dirty cop gets busted for killing someone?

This is how the conversation goes.

Detective - So do you want to tell us what happened?

Dirty cop - Not if it jeopardizes my pension.

Detective - You're looking at the death penalty here unless you cooperate.

Dirty cop - I'm saying anything without my pension being protected.

That's what I think of when I read this piece sent to me by reader Jeremy...........

A District Court judge denied a motion to dismiss a fraud charge Wednesday against the city's former human resources director.

Lisa Roth is accused of directing staff members to falsify documents to allow a former Police Department employee, Linda Clark, to be eligible for retirement. She is charged with a misdemeanor count of making false statements to the state retirement system.

Laura Masters, a former compensation analyst with the city, said Clark was facing termination and did not have enough hours to qualify for retirement benefits.

Masters said Roth directed her to “fix it that she can retire.” Masters said Clark had 19 years of service and needed 20 years to qualify for retirement benefits. She said city policy allowed only sick pay to be used in accumulating additional days of service for retirement, but Masters said Roth directed her to apply comp time and vacation time to Clark's service
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Now why would someone go to such trouble unless it was worth it?

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

A public pension is basically the financial equivalent of a commune. Everyone contributes according to ability and everyone withdraws according to their need.

And just like a commune, where no individual accounting is done on contributions/withdraws, the collective tends to want to withdraw more than it contributes. Ultimately the commune collapses, as will the public pension system, though the latter has taken longer but will have a more violent collapse.

The difference is the public pension collective expects the taxpayer to keep it afloat in times of shortfall. It would be like a commune, panicking at the depletion of their own organically grown food stores, demanding that Kroger immediately deliver a truckload of free meat, bread, and milk. The rationale would be that the commune promised X amount of food to each member but only delivered half of X and now we are hungry. To seal the deal the commune would make sure everyone knew that the demands of Kroger are being made solely "for the children".

The public pension gets away with this crap because they can quietly borrow truckloads of money to cover up the pension mismanagement of its organically grown funds. The problem is, by the time there is a recognition of a problem, it already has reached crisis.

That is where we are: A commune of 50,000 people in the desert, crops consumed, ordering the rest of "evil" society clear out their cupboards "for the children".