Thursday, September 27, 2007

Message In a Bottle

Judging from my email in the past two weeks, PERS must have begun its campaign of adjusting member benefits of retired Police and Fire. I've heard from about a dozen P&F retirees whose benefit adjustments have been large (negative) and whose actuarial recovery amounts are significantly higher than general service members who owe the same amount and are approximately the same age at implementation. The reason for this is obvious - at least to me. PERS uses different actuarial tables for P & F. Undoubtedly, they also use different actuarial recovery tables for P & F retirees. These recovery tables clearly expect P & F members to have shorter life expectancies and therefore the recovery period for overpayments is expected to be shorter. Consequently the adjustment to the regular benefit is greater (shorter life expectancy) and the payback amount by the ARM is significantly larger. The end result is that P & F members are getting hit significantly harder than general service retirees.

As soon as I get copies of the ARM tables for P & F members, I will begin to adjust my program so that P & F members can get a closer estimate of their adjusted benefits than they can now. Hopefully, Judge Kantor's injunction will hold upon review. At least this way the payback amount won't play into P & F benefits (or any one else's for that matter) until Arken and Robinson run their course through the courts.

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