I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
At a time when double dipping has invited extra scrutiny in New Mexico, a new state law bans disclosing to the public the pension amounts for tens of thousands of public-sector retirees.
The statute in question, which easily cleared the Legislature this year, prohibits the Educational Retirement Board (ERB) from releasing pension amounts for any of its 30,000 members who retired from state and local educational systems.
The ban comes at a time when state officials are struggling to contain costs and have targeted the practice of double dipping, when a public sector retiree returns to work for the state, collecting both a salary and a pension.
The Independent discovered the new rules, which include a petty misdemeanor charge for anyone who knowingly violates them, when it requested pension amounts for retirees earlier this month.
After learning that the law prohibited such disclosures, the sponsor of the law (Chapter 22-11-55) said Monday that the law was being used more broadly than he intended and that lawmakers will try for a legislative fix in the upcoming session.
“We’re not trying to be secretive about this. There’s a technical problem that we’ll try to fix this session,” Rep. Jack Thomas, D-Rio Rancho, said, referring to the coming legislative session in January.
“I wouldn’t carry a bill that would restrict what you can get,” Thomas told the Independent. “We need to be open as we can be.”
The new law was put in place to guard against certain requests, he said, like those from family members of a deceased retiree who are fighting over who will receive pension benefits.
“I guess they were having problems with family members who were trying to figure out who was getting the money,” Thomas said of the pension amounts.
Officials at the ERB declined to comment.
The law, which took effect July 1, prohibits the Educational Retirement Board from disclosing the pension amount for any of its members, although that result was not clear to many earlier this year.
An analysis by the Legislative Education Study Committee in mid March, near the end of this year’s 60-day legislative session, said that the legislation helped “protect sensitive data from disclosure, without affecting the ability of the public to access appropriate records.”
But in fact the law allows the agency to only release information about a member’s service credit, reported salary and contributions made to their pensions by members and local administrative units. The employer, like say a local school district, and the individual employee make contributions into the pension. It is possible, based on computations from the information provided by ERB, to arrive at a member’s pension amount. But it is not foolproof and could lead to inaccurate conclusions.
The ERB’s new rules diverge from the Public Employees Retirement Association (PERA), which administers pensions for thousands of former non-educational government workers. PERA does not have rules barring disclosure of pension information.
Prior to the law, the ERB could disclose pension amounts.
The increased scrutiny of double dipping, and the public’s interest in retirees’ pension amounts, coincides with cost-saving efforts by state officials as the state faces a large budget shortfall for the year that starts July 1.
Unlike most state workers, retirees who return to work do not contribute to the pension system–but the state continues to pay into the system on their behalf.
