The New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (NYSTRS) has officially confirmed pretty much what it predicted last fall: the taxpayer-financed pension contribution rate payable in the fall of 2015 will rise to 17.53 percent of teacher payrolls, or 1.28 percent above the contribution payable this coming September.
The expected state court battle over newly enacted public pension changes in Illinois will bear close watching throughout the country–especially in New York. That’s because, when it comes to protecting pension benefits, the 1970 Illinois State Constitution closely follows the wording of New York’s 1938 State Constitution.
Working added overtime to increase retirement benefits—i.e., pension padding or “spiking”—is an old tradition in the public sector, especially among police officers, firefighters and other employees working under contracts that provide them with ample overtime opportunities.
The Tier 6 pension “reform” enacted by New York last year applies to all state and local employees who join the state Employee Retirement System or the Police and Fire Retirement System after April 1, 2012
A new national study estimates that New York’s two largest state-level pension systems have unfunded liabilities of at least $260 billion, using an alternative calculation method that estimates pension liabilities using more conservative interest rate assumptions...
Effective July 1, some newly hired non-union employees of state and local government in New York will be able to opt into the same defined-contribution retirement plan that’s been available for nearly 50 years to faculty and staff of the State University of New York.
Leveraging his clout as sole trustee of New York State’s $160 billion Common Retirement Fund, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli is making increased use of corporate shareholder resolutions to push political and social agendas that have little or nothing to do with corporate performance
The state pension fund gained about 10.4 percent on its investments during the recently ended 2012-13 fiscal year, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced today. The latest gain is comfortably above the pension fund’s 7.5 percent target rate of return.
Opponents of Governor Cuomo’s 2 percent property tax cap were able to stick one major exclusion into the legislation before it passed in 2011: a provision excluding a portion of local government and school employee pensions from the total allowable “levy limit” in years when taxpayer-funded employer contributions rise by more than two percentage points of salaries.
New York’s new “stable option” pension gimmick for local governments and school districts is “a stopgap with long-term risks,” Moody’s Investor Service warned this week.
Public employee unions can’t invoke the Triborough Amendment to preserve old pension plans that did not require employee contributions, the state Court of Appeals held in two cases this week. The rulings, favoring management in the cities of Yonkers and Oswego, were a solid win for taxpayers.
Requiring timely payment in full of every employer’s actuarially determined annual required contribution is among the hallmarks of pension fund probity, in both the public and private sectors. Unlike many of its counterparts in other states, the New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (NYSTRS) has always lived up to that high standard. Until now.
