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public employees

  • An opportunity for lawmakers to fix Colorado’s broken public pension system

    An opportunity for lawmakers to fix Colorado’s broken public pension system0

    • June 22, 2017

    Last fall, members of the Colorado Public Employee Retirement Association (PERA) got some bad news: the amortization periods for the public pension system’s two largest funds had ballooned dangerously. Under current assumptions, the state fund would not be fully funded for 55 years, and the even larger school fund would not be fully funded for 75 years.

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  • Colorado’s PERA shortchanging state workers and taxpayers0

    • June 23, 2014

    Problems with Colorado’s public employee pension system are making it hard for our state government to attract some of the best employees. That’s the persuasive finding of a new study by the Urban Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington. An employer’s retirement plan is part of an overall compensation package designed to entice and

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  • Preventing Bankruptcy in State and Local Pension Plans in Colorado0

    • August 22, 2012

    State and local governments report the funding status of their pension plans in financial statements following standards set by the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB). Historically, those standards allowed state and local governments to use an actuarial model and to discount liabilities based on the long-term yield on the assets held in the pension fund. The Colorado Public Employees’ Retirement Association (PERA) uses an 8 percent discount rate comparable to that used in most state and local pension plans. GASB also allowed state and local governments to use a smoothing technique to calculate the funding status of the plans. With this smoothing technique, losses incurred on assets in one year could be averaged over several years.

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  • Implicit Compensation for Career Public Employees0

    • May 3, 2007

    The Colorado Division of Human Resources (DHR) conducts an annual compensation survey to support a state policy that provides competitive total compensation to ensure a qualified and competent workforce. Because this survey is significantly flawed in its estimation of retirement compensation, the comparison between private and public sector compensation is distorted. In particular, DHR substantially understaes retirement compensation for career public employees in Colorado. To indicate the magnitude of understatement, our study of PERA retirement benefits provides an historical baseline from which to evaluate retirement compensation. Improved estimates of implicit retirement compensation would allow a more realistic comparison between private and public sector compensation, and would support better decision making about allocation of scarce tax dollars for public employee compensation.

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