“[The pension system’s] already increased to a degree that would have been considered astounding and unimaginable if you would have told people this circa 2000 that we would be paying $10 billion a year to the pension fund in New York City, which is almost 10 times what it was then,” said Edmund J. McMahon, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and research director of the Empire Center for Public Policy.

“It will remain sustainable at the expense of everything else, there’s no choice but to sustain it,” he continued.

Who’s Checking When it Comes to OT?

According to the city, agencies are responsible for authorizing employee’s overtime work and most civilian employees have a cash overtime cap.

Although pension calculations vary by plan, those benefits are calculated as a percentage based on the length of service multiplied by an average salary, typically three to five years.

Cash overtime earnings count as part of an employee’s base salary to calculate benefits and can increase an employee’s pension within limits set by the pension plan, the city said.

There are also restrictions to prevent employees from spiking their overtime in the last year to increase their pension, but Doulis pointed out that overtime is often given out by seniority in the last few years before retirement.

Doulis said often times senior police officers, firefighters, and corrections officers work a tremendous amount of overtime to increase their final average salary to lock in higher a pension.

“Every day New Yorkers see the results of the hard work done by our dedicated public servants, including police officers, teachers and firefighters,” a City Hall spokesperson said. “Occasionally, overtime is necessary to face unplanned events or meet critical operational need. We take our fiscal responsibility seriously and are constantly monitoring its use citywide.”

The city also said that a waiver of employee cash overtime caps must be pre-approved by the Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Labor Relations, and that it has also set caps on city-funded uniformed overtime for FDNY, NYPD, and the Department of Correction.

Disability

When it comes to proving a disability, whether or not someone is eligible is determined by the individual pension systems. Each fund has an independent medical board that gives recommendations reviewed by the pension funds’ board of trustees.

Based on 2015 and 2017 available data from the financial reports of the city’s five pension funds, the top three funds with members on disability were the New York Employees’ Retirement System — the largest of the five pension systems —  the Police Pension Fund, and the Fire Pension Fund.

In 2017, 16,888 members of NYCERS, which represents civil servants, sanitation and correction employees, the MTA, NYCHA, Health and Hospitals, and appointed and elected officials, collected disability payouts. Some 10,515 FDNY employees collected disability payouts, and data from 2015 showed that 15,366 NYPD employees collected disability payouts.

“Disability pensions are paid out on a more generous basis than your typical service pension,” CBC’s Doulis said. “It increases the cost of pensions paid overall and the uniformed services in particular have higher rates of disability, which is part of the reason why pension benefits for those workers are more expensive overall.”

For members of the Police Pension Fund, the fund can call a disability retiree back for a medical review once a year, however, once that retiree is eligible for service retirement, state law prohibits the fund from bringing the retiree in for reexamination, even if it may appear they are abusing the benefit.

“We are prohibited by law from bringing anybody back once they have more than 20 years,” Police Pension Fund’s General Counsel Nicole Giambarrese said. “They can’t come back to work, it would kind of be a waste of time and money to pay a doctor to examine them … absent the statute changing which is probably not likely.”

The Fire Pension Fund has a similar system to the Police Pension Fund Giambarrese said, but the fund could not be reached for comment.

With the NYCERS, the fund said that upon the request of its medical board, a disability pensioner who is under the minimum age or service requirement for retirement may be required once a year to undergo a medical exam to determine if they can work.

Doulis said disability payouts raise the overall cost of the pension system in the long run.