NYS Comptroller Tom DiNapoli Proposal Will Catch Pension Abusers

New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli proposed legislation today to greatly enhance his ability to catch those who abuse the pension system. The bill would grant the Comptroller access to New York State Department of Taxation and Finance’s wage reporting system to identify New York State and Local Retirement System retirees working for local governments who exceed post-retirement earnings limitations. If a state or local government employee earns more than those limits, the Comptroller has the authority to suspend and recoup any excess pension payments.

“This legislation sends a message to anyone who tries to game the retirement system: if you don’t play by the rules, we will find you and make you pay,” said DiNapoli. “Government agencies should be enabled to work together to reduce waste, fraud and abuse. This legislation will do just that. We have half the puzzle and Tax and Finance has the other half. Together, we’ll solve this problem and stop this kind of abuse.”

Currently, the Retirement and Social Security Law (RSSL) places limits on the amount that may be earned by a retiree who returns to public employment without it affecting his or her pension payments. Most retirees are covered by Section 212 of the RSSL, which allows retirees under age 65 to earn up to $30,000 per calendar year without any pension penalty.

The Retirement System annually compares information for state employees with the State Comptroller’s Office Division of Payroll to identify retirees who have obtained employment with the state. In addition, a law passed in 2008 requires school districts and BOCES to annually report all public retirees, including independent contractors and consultants, on their payrolls during the previous calendar year. If retirees are found to have exceeded the wage earnings limitations, the Retirement System suspends and recoups excess pension payments.

However, there currently isn’t a mechanism for a similar comparison for retirees employed by the thousands of local public employers in the state. DiNapoli’s legislation would amend Section 171-a of the Tax Law to grant the Comptroller’s Office access to Tax and Finance’s wage reporting system to match the Retirement System’s records with information reported by local governments to Tax and Finance. This match would allow the Comptroller’s Office to identify retirees improperly collecting a state pension and a local government salary.

In February, Comptroller DiNapoli and Oneida County District Attorney Scott McNamara announced that former Rome police officer Thomas C. Hubal had been convicted of third-degree larceny for earning more than his pension legal limit over a nine-year period. Hubal must repay more than $88,000 and serve six-months incarceration for defrauding the system. If this legislation had been in effect, Mr. Hubal would have been caught in the first year that his salary exceeded his pension limitation.

Under current law, it is the responsibility of retirees to report any post-retirement income to the Retirement System. Each year, all retirees are mailed a Report of Post-Retirement Employment Form, which must be filled out and returned to the State Comptroller’s Office if the retiree received any earnings from public employment.

NYC Gov't Workers Paid Less Than Private Sector Peers, Study Finds

First Report by Retirement Security NYC Offers Comprehensive Analysis
of Firefighter, Police Officer, Teacher, and Other Municipal Employee Pay

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Retirement Security NYC, the initiative by New York City Comptroller John C. Liu to provide research on public employee pension issues, today released its first study, entitled “Municipal Employee Compensation in New York City.”

Authored by the Comptroller’s Chief Economist Frank Braconi, Ph.D., the report found that New York City municipal employees are paid 17% less on average than their NYC private sector, for-profit counterparts. 

This is before adjustments for education and size of employer.

In addition, the study demonstrated that there is a narrower range between the top and bottom of the pay scales for municipal workers than for employees at private companies. “This ‘wage compression’ among City workers means there is less of an income gap in the public sector,” said Braconi. “These local findings reflect similar studies of public versus private sector wage patterns both across the states and nationally.”

“These findings about municipal salaries are an important foundation for any discussion about public employee pensions,” said Comptroller Liu. “The issue of retirement needs to be looked at in the context of the overall compensation package earned by public employees.

The study also found that:

• New York City employees are better educated, on average, than their private sector peers. Forty-nine percent of City workers have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 41% of those employed in New York’s private for-profit sector.
• Large private, for-profit employers (those with more than 1,000 employees) pay wages that are 13% higher on average than small and midsize private employers.
• The City’s retirement cost contribution for most civilian workers is roughly equivalent to a large corporate employer’s cost of contributing to a defined contribution (a.k.a traditional pension) plan, if return-on-investment targets are met.

“This kind of objective research will serve both public employees and the taxpayers,” Comptroller Liu added. “Policy decisions of this magnitude must be made thoughtfully and based on the facts.”

Download the full report here.

Download the Report Summary here.

About Retirement Security NYC

Retirement Security NYC is a major initiative launched by Comptroller John C. Liu to protect the retirement security of public employees while ensuring the City’s financial health. Retirement Security NYC has partnered with two leading institutions—the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS) and The New School’s Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA)—to analyze the current state of public pensions and offer sensible reforms.

Wayne Barrett: Time for Something New - Village Voice - Runnin' Scared

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Wayne Barrett retires from Village Voice...Tom Robbins Joins Him...

Ed Koch and I were inaugurated on the same day in 1978. He became mayor and I became his weekly tormentor.

I had written a few pieces for the Voice before I took over the Runnin' Scared column that January, going back as far as 1973.

But I was now inheriting a column that Mary Nichols, theVoice's editor-in-chief, had made famous, and that had been written by greats like Jack Newfield, Ken Auletta, and Joe Conason. A country kid out of Lynchburg, Virginia, where I'd founded the Teenage Republicans, I was suddenly occupying the first two pages of New York's counter-cultural crier.

Since then, I have written, by my own inexact calculation, more column inches than anyone in the history of the Voice. These will be my last.

I am 65 and a half now, and it is time for something new.

If I didn't see that, others did.

The paper has always been more than an employer to me. I turned down other jobs that paid better three times to stay here. Though my mentor Newfield used to say we got our owners "from office temporaries," and though I worked for 14 different editors, the Voicewas always a place where I could express my voice. And that meant more to me than larger circulations or greater influence or bigger paychecks.

It is called a writer's paper because we decide what we will write. That is not a license to spout and I never took it as such. Across all these years, I almost never wrote in the first person and, even when I did, the piece was still packed with reportage. In my extended family, I have become the go-to guy for eulogies and I report every one of them, learning more about my mother, for example, by interviewing her sisters than she ever told me when she was alive.

When I was asked in recent years to blog frequently, I wouldn't do it unless I had something new to tell a reader, not just a clever regurgitation of someone else's reporting.
My credo has always been that the only reason readers come back to you again and again over decades is because of what you unearth for them, and that the joy of our profession is discovery, not dissertation.

There is also no other job where you get paid to tell the truth. Other professionals do sometimes tell the truth, but it's ancillary to what they do, not the purpose of their job. I was asked years ago to address the elementary school that my son attended and tell them what a reporter did and I went to the auditorium in a trenchcoat with the collar up and a notebook in a my pocket, baring it to announce that "we are detectives for the people."

When the Voice celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2005, I said "we thought a deadline meant we had to kill somebody by closing time," and that, as a liberal Democratic paper, we were "better at goring one of our own." It never mattered to me what the party or ideology was of the subject of an investigative piece; the reporting was as nonpartisan as the wrongdoing itself. I never looked past the wrist of any hand in the public till. It was the grabbing that bothered me, and there was no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the loot.

The greatest prize I've ever won for the work I've done in these pages was when Al D'Amato called me a "viper" in his memoir. Chuck Schumer, who ended D'Amato's reign after 18 years, ascribed his victory in a 2007 memoir to a story I'd written a decade earlier that devastated the incumbent Republican. What Schumer didn't say was that as soon as Hank Morris, Schumer's media guru, went up with an ad based on my revelations about D'Amato, Arthur Finkelstein, who was running D'Amato's 1998 campaign, aired a commercial about Schumer's near-indictment and flashed my nearly two-decade-old clips breaking that scandal on the screen as well. I was the maestro of a commercial duel.
Even as my scandal stories skewered David Dinkins in the 1989 and 1993 mayoral campaigns, I chronicled the devolution of his nemesis, Rudy Giuliani, from hero prosecutor to used 9/11 memorabilia salesman.

As awkwardly as I felt about it, Carl Paladino's toughest shots at Andrew Cuomo this fall were garbled renditions of two 6000-word exposes I'd done here about Cuomo's HUD record. For a week in the 2009 mayoral campaign, I couldn't turn on the TV without seeing a Bloomberg commercial drawn from my expose of Bill Thompson's conflict-ridden home mortgage. But I'd delivered one cover-story blow after another throughout the cycle about everything from the mayor's culpability in the Deutsche Bank fire debacle to his own governmental incest with Bloomberg L.P.

It was always the conduct that prodded me to write, not the person. And that is what I lived for, a chance to say something that revealed and mattered. To me, the story will always be the thing. It is all I can see.

I believe I have much left to learn, still armed with my notebook, and thus much left to tell you. It may be books or blogs or something in between. I hope to bring my trademark interns with me because they have, for more than 30 years, helped me think young, especially when it comes to the climate and water crises. The city and state beat are precious to me, but what is happening to our nation is also a frightening pull on me, so I don't know what I will wind up writing in this new life.

I have loved my bond with you and have never traded an inch of truth for a moment, or even a season, of access. I tell the young people still drawn to this duty that it is the most honorable one in America, and that I have never met a corrupt journalist. I even met one, Tom Robbins, so brave that when he heard I was leaving, he quit himself and didn't even tell me he was. "I'm going out with the guy who brought me to the dance," Robbins told me after he resigned, crafting a lede with the very fiber of his life.

"If a newspaper writes the story of its city without compromise or calculation," I wrote in that 50th anniversary piece, "it is as breathtaking as a ballet, each detail another artful step. Put us together as bound volumes in the memory of this grandest of cities and theVoice reads like a classic, ever passionate and principled."

I will pray it always does.