Thursday, April 07, 2005

Running on Faith

This seems to be the story for many recent PERS retirees. I've been reading and hearing stories about PERS members who've retired in the past year who are still receiving estimated benefits. PERS is running far behind in calculating actual benefits. However, every once in awhile I hear a story about someone who has seemingly "jumped the line" and is getting actual benefits long before those who retired much earlier. Worse still, in several of these cases, the actual benefits appear to be incorrect - even when looking at the data PERS provides in its Notice of Entitlement. It's gonna take a lot more than faith for PERS to put all the pieces back together again once the Court finally either gives us nirvana or the gas pipe. I think that whoever expects PERS to be able to rebuild all its databases and unroll all the pieces of Legislation that have been struck down by the court by August 2006 is simply dreaming. If they can't send out correctly calculated benefits under a clear set of rules, just imagine what they'll do in the future. It would be optimistic to expect all the backlog and the to-be backlog to be cleared before 2007, if then.

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