Double Dipping Government Workers Fired!

This is a widespread issue seen across the nation with outrageously generous retirements and benefits as well as golden goodbye packages.

Citation needed!

Well MYOB all you would have to do is pay a little attention to the news, 60 minutes, etc. to be aware of multiple instances from California to New York, Florida to Washington and everywhere in-between.

Google DROP Deferred Retirement Option Programs. Add various qualifiers like California, Philadelphia, Florida, etc. Citation indeed... pound sand.

Until very recently NM had the same practice. Local police had retired and then hired by the State Police. Gov't workers retire and then go to another gov't job.

This process was just stopped last year in this state.

I am a beneficiary of the Louisiana DROP program. In my state, once you are eligible for retirement you must make a decision to retire, continue working, or enter the DROP program. DROP is a period of up to 36 months during which your retirement income goes into a NON interest-bearing account. At the end of the 36 months you must make a decision to retire OR to continue working. Either way, your AGENCY must submit paperwork to the Retiremesnt System concerning your status. That prevents the double dipping mentioned in the article.

There are disadvantages to DROP that are not apparent to the general public and often not to the state employee: You are gambling on not wishing to continue working beyond the 36 months. Also, since your retirement is now frozen at pre-DROP level, you are gambling that your salary will not increase by much. In my case, just as I came out of DROP, I got a huge promotion that increased my salary by 18%. In order to realize any long-term benefit from that raise, I had to work another 36 months for that raise to be applied to my already existing pension. And in the middle of that period, I also got another big promotion which meant an additional three years to be of any long term value. In the end, I worked another seven years past DROP which increased my pension by $700.00 monthly--and I was at a fairly high GS level. So you see, it isn't the golden parachute you may have envisioned.

Quite often, DROP participants who continue working regret the decision to have chosen this option. The bulk of their pension is frozen at a maximum of 75% of their salary at the time they reached retirement age which is based either on years worked or age 55 in most cases. Had they not entered DROP, their pensions would have risen 2.5% annually. Had they worked another ten years without entering DROP, they would have retired at 100% of the average of their final three years after a 40 year career. They realize that they want to go on working (for whatever reason) and that now they will NEVER reach 100%. Then they go whining to their representatives that they want to give the DROP money back, pay interest to the state, and then retire at full salary. I hope our legislature never allows this.

BTW, before our legislature passed a law guaranteeing that DROP accounts could lose money based on the performance of the Retirement System's investment, participants were in the precarious position of actually losing money!

correction: passed a law that DROP accounts could NOT lose money!

Not all DROPs are created equal. One should not condemn all DROPs as they are not all bad. Neither is Double Dipping entirely. DROPs have become a common vehicle of abuse by local governments granting themselves excessive gratuitous benefits and exclusive SWAG (meaning stuff they all get).

Double Dipping I think originated from Military or other occupations that achieved full retirement after 20 years (far short of a persons possible working career) and subsequently exiting for another career. Frankly I see nothing wrong with the initial concept in that usually these retirement after 20yrs occupations were risky.

The parlaying this into other occupations and standard government civil service begins the slide into abusive territory. Now we have local government personnel granting themselves these plans after a single term in office and they don't even leave office. Further, some have extended this to appointees (relatives through nepotism) and the abuse gravy train is up to full steam draining the community coffers at unsustainable rates. The oversight of local governments seems pretty much nonexistent and apparently there are no checks and balances at this level.

Star, shortly before the DROP system was adopted in Louisiana there was a HUGE scandal because a crafty high-level state employee figured out how to really game the retirement system legally. (We government workers aren't nearly as dumb as some people think!) The head of one of the programs retired from her classified and started collecting her pension. Then she used political pull to be named head of the agency (an unclassified position) and started collecting the salary named by the governor for her. She wasn't the only one to figure this out, but once it hit the newspapers the scam came to a quick end. The legislature passed laws making it impossible to collect your pension while working full time in a "permanent" position. Now you can work up to six months or up to 50% of your annual pension without losing it, but after than, you have to enter the retirement system again and forego your pension.

While I was still working, there were always rumors flying around that DROP was on its way out. I never worried about it. So long as the legislators and judges are eligible for participation, DROP is safe!

Corruption is the real issue and it's not limited to any single program... wherever a weasel can they will find a way to do their work. I only tagged DROP because there have been a number of incidents associated with it, its easy to find, and it's a common program these days. A lot of the abuse is legal or borderline legal loopholes or just things we have not learned to make illegal. Bigger than that you cannot legislate moral integrity any more than you can legislate the direction of the wind. Chasing the criminal mind with laws and law enforcement is the loosing whack-a-mole game although temporarily necessary along with significantly increasing the penalties. Changing the hearts and minds is the winning strategy to all this loss of integrity and social decay but we are not currently inclined to pursue this and it will take decades (generations) to turn the tide once we are.

Robert: Other than the union membership of these individuals, what exactly does this problem have to do with the union? Are you meaning that only union members commit these type of actions? Or is the fact you dislike unions in general cause you to reach to blame the union for all actions of their members? If a union member robs a bank, does that mean the union caused him to do it? While I do agree what is being done by those people was/is wrong, I fail to see how you can accuse the union of wrong doing in this instance!

Robert:

I do not dislike unions, though I do feel that their presence in the public sector is problematic,

I think from the tone of the posts from the right on this issue, that many others, if not you (which some of your past posts seem to indicate) have a major dislike for unions in general!

You ask if it think this situation is a problem, I could only answer yes, of course it is a problem. However it is not a union and state government problem, it is a management problem caused by lack of over site within the state government! The state needs to correct the problem,it's not the unions responsibility to force management to be good managers of the tax payers money! You have a problem with these people doing what they did, take it up with the people responsible, the individual and the state management!

it would be better however, the generous payouts they voted for themselves is the elephant in the room. it's just blatant, outrageous, malfeasance. It seems there is no oversight in place for local/city governments and the word spread quickly on how to rape the community for personal gain.

It's easy for them to blame the Union when they set the culture....In Florida "non union right to work State" employees can go into the "DROP" program...draw your pension in an interest bearing account and keep working until you decide to stop them get it in a lump sum plus your monthly checks keep coming...no union did it the bureaucrats created it...

Had a few coworkers that did it and are doing it right now...I retired at 62 left and didn't come back....they stay get their salery and the pension check goes into an account...and yes there is no union...we tried to start one but the County scared a lot of folks out of filling out the cards..

http://www.dms.myflorida.com/human_resource_support/retirement/employee_page/deferred_retirement_option_program_drop

This isn't just a "union" or "government" issue.

If you go into the military at 18, you can retire and start drawing a pension at the age of 38 (20 years), and get hired back as a civilian employee at a higher wage, than retire from that job at 58.

If you're mid or upper management, you can retire from the corporation and get hired back as a consultant.

But I forgot to add, that at the age of 62, you can apply and receive early Social Security.

The military retirement is taxed as an early withdrawal from retirement until age 62.

I think the law needs to be changed on deductions - there shouldn't be any.

Social security works like this if you retire at 62 and continue to work you get penalized by having to pay 50% back to social security if you make over about $14,000, It works pretty much like that until you reach 67 and then you are no longer penalized.

I do not think that any public sector employee should be able to draw on more than one retirement plan. I don't care how many agencies that you work for.

Robert, I explained the Louisiana DROP account at #2.6. Wizeguy neglected to mention that there is a limited period of participation. I see that Florida's is five years. In Louisiana, it is three years. Also, in Louisiana, your retirement does not receive COLAs while you are in DROP.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/17/MNHH1MDUCV.DTL

here ya go he is a Double Dipper...

If this kind of stuff is occurring then these workers deserve to be fired and stripped of their benefits and criminal charges potentially brought down,

It sounds like whoever was in charge of processing the paperwork for those pensions should also be fired. The article says that "their paperwork wasn’t signed by the right supervisors".

Robert, there weren't many details in the article, but it made me wonder if some of those people had received payoffs for pushing through the paperwork without the proper signatures. Was forgery involved? I hope that this is thoroughly investigated, and proper internal controls are put into place so that this will not happen again.

Union solidarity......workers unite to extort.

Great Seed Robert!!!

It sounds like the investigation has not been completed. Please keep us updated on how this all plays out.

Stories like this have been in the news for years.........common in practically every state where unions are present.

Proximity does not infer causation. Could we focus on bad regardless of affiliation, the partisan dance is wearing thin. Remove the political, cognitive bias lens and we might actually make some meaningful change.

smoke does not mean fire then???........so it means nothing that 93% of union donations go to the DNC? Can you spell PAC.......

Hi Robert,

There are many sources if you search "Rick Perry double dipping", but here is one from a Tampa Bay source: http://www.tampabay.com/news/article1206718.ece

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/12/17/MNHH1MDUCV.DTL

Just do a Perry Retirement search and you will end up with thousands of articles, here is one.

Perry's retirement, pay boost spark charges of hypocrisy

Wow!!!

I hadn't heard that one yet about Rick Perry. I guess that means we should forgive the Governor Perry and the Canton 29 and just let the Republicans deregulate morals and ethics as well. After all, Christians are a forgiving folk and we should simply let God be the final judge and not get ourselves worked up into such a tizzy.

Always fun to try to deflect and redirect. Are their any Union owned company's out there? It would seem that a Union owned company would always put its employee's first, keep jobs in America. Any examples out there?

I kind of figured that , but it would be nice if a company existed that wanted to keep jobs in America, and be responsible to the employee first, shareholder second.

So you are saying that government workers do not earn their pension but the guy who tanks their company and then leaves does?

Kind of like what Congress does.

I see nothing wrong with that. Military retirement is a different animal and it was with two completely different entities, so they essentially had two careers.

What the article is describing is people retiring from and then keeping the same job without informing management.

This happens in the military.... military instructors can retire as a "green suiter" and get hired as "civilian suiter" and be back as an instructor the next day.

I know a Warrant Officer who's job position was going to be replaced with a civilian after he retired. He wrote the job description for the position, then retired and got hired back to fill it as a civilian and with significantly higher pay check.

I disagree, Robert, a desire to serve the community should be reason to run for office not perks or what is in it for them. Also, how can they fairly negotiate benefits for employees and the tax payers when they stand to gain themselves. It is also normal here that only full time employees have benefits and these elected officials are not full time themselves, yet they make allowances for themselves.

you're kidding, he doesn't get just one government service pension? ridiculous. Does he receive the congressional pension while serving as governor?

Our Ohio Governor is getting a pension from the federal government for being a House Representative and will also get a pension now from the state of Ohio for being its governor. I think examples like this should be stopped. I also think we should not allow any Congressmen to get a pension just for serving one 2 year term, but it should be a min of years before you can get one.

Why should what pension someone earns at the federal level affect what they are entitles to at the state level? As far as I know, only federal employees are allowed in in the federal system. Anything earned at a different government agency, that is in a different pension plan, should be due to that employee, just like it is to the other employees. IMO, it is the elected offices that are to blame for both the rules outlining who is eligible for a pension, and a short term office holder even being eligible for a pension.

If I work 25 years in a Florida state job and retire, does that preclude me from going to Michigan and working 25 years for a city job and receiving a pension there also? Why should the person who has earned the pension at each job, be accused of cheating the system? If someone works 2 or 3 jobs and has earned the pension as part of their employment package, what is different than working one job for 50 years and just getting one pension?

I agree there is a problem with 2 jobs under the same retirement system, but that comes from the politicians who have enacted the rules. It does not come from a union holding a gun to managements head and saying either give us what we want or else, it comes from the administration of the government agency that is holding the purse strings.

Abuses need to be addressed in the pension system, but they also need to be addressed in how people think that if they are not the ones who benefit personally, then the whole system is bad. Maybe it is time for more people to start looking at big corporations to get back to funding realistic pension plans that benefit all employees, not just the top dogs. The disparity between public vs private pensions, needs to be addressed equitably and with the entire pay package being part of the discussion.

IMO, if someone has fulfilled their employment contract, they are due the benefits that were part of their employment package unless they receive some payment in lieu of a certain benefit. That said, there should be zero people allowed to pay into the same retirement system/plan more than once. They should be eligible for extra benefit that is close to the retirement benefit, if it is not used/allowed to be used. Anything less means that the employee is not getting equal pay for the job.

If more private companies would pay reasonable pensions, there would be far less demand for the services of SS. We should be demanding that our legislators give a credit to the companies that give a reasonable pension to ALL employees. Penalizing the ones who dump the "peon pension" in favor of the golden parachute pensions of the big wig campaign donors, should be penalized with a surcharge on their taxes. This would help far more people in their golden years than what relying strictly on SS does.

The fault and malfeasance seems to be shared by the union and the administration in my opinion.

As far as I know, unions are not responsible for administering government pensions.

so, if the employee was intending to commit fraud, by double dipping, and didn't inform the union.. they would have no way of knowing?

sounds that way. although it is possible that the employees were scamming everyone. it would take an elaborate set of lies, but once you got past the first hurdle, the machine would just keep rolling along.

its also traditional for mafia to have people listed for jobs they dont actually work in order to explain illegal income. since we're speculating.

So while the story does not say specifically it seems that someone in the union and the administration would have had to have known in order for them to get pension checks and regular checks at the same time.

So, maybe there was collusion between government and union officials, but ultimately, the government is responsible for ensuring that the paperwork for the pensions is correct, and that the people receiving pension payments are truly eligible.

Thanks taxpayers........

Actually, my friend died. He was folding socks and had a massive heart attack. He was dead in moments.

And to this stay I still fold my socks. Some people never learn, I guess.