CONTACT: Tim Hoefer
(518) 434-3100

A searchable database of pension benefits for 203,474 retired New York City government employees was posted today on SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s government transparency web site.

The database includes the names, retirement dates and, in most cases, the most recent employer for all individuals collecting pension benefits as of December 31, 2009 from the three city pension systems. They are: New York City Employees’ Retirement System (NYCERS), the New York City Teachers’ Retirement System (NYCTRS) and the Board of Education Retirement System of the City of New York (BERS).

Not included are the pensions of retired police and firefighters. The Empire Center has filed lawsuits against both the New York City Police Pension fund and the New York City Fire Department Pension Fund for their failure to comply with Freedom of Information Law requests for pension information.

Despite accounting for only a third of the retirees in the database posted by SeeThroughNY today, NYCTRS retirees account for 99 percent of the 729 pensions exceeding $100,000 among members of the three city systems.

The benefit levels shown in the database are maximum allowable benefits, which can exceed the amount actually collected by those retirees who, for example, opt to receive less in order to preserve a continuing benefit for their survivors.

A table listing the top 100 pension earners can be downloaded by clicking here.

SeeThroughNY allows the public to examine government expenditures on the Internet. It includes payrolls for New York State and New York City government, counties, municipalities and school districts throughout the state, and dozens of public authorities. Also posted are pension data for local government and school district employees outside New York City; state legislators’ office expenditures and pork barrel “member item” projects, and a benchmarking feature for comparing local government and school district spending. The site was launched July 31, 2008.

The Albany-based Empire Center is a project of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, one of the nation’s leading non-profit 501(c)3 think tanks.

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