Sunday, June 29, 2008

Pay Plus Pension

From the Boston Globe via NewsAlert:

Nearly 100 retired educators in the Commonwealth were allowed to earn their full salaries while collecting full pensions in the past school year, a growing practice critics call state-sanctioned "double dipping."

The retirees collectively made more than $5 million on the job while taking home $5.5 million in pension payments, according to information obtained by the Globe...

Critics say the practice, which was designed to make it easier for districts to fill hard-to-staff positions, leaves the door open for abuse, enticing a pool of well-connected retirees to move from one job to the next or stay indefinitely in a position that should have been filled by a nonretiree. In some cases, school districts have been allowed to continue rehiring the same retiree rather than readvertising for the position each year and providing fresh proof that they could find no one else to fill the spot, another state requirement.


Good work if you can get it, I guess.

3 comments:

  1. "...The retirees collectively made more than $5 million on the job while taking home $5.5 million in pension payments

    Does this mean retirement pensions pay MORE than a full time pay check?

    Wow, What a racket

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  2. My father is currently doing exactly this in California. He works for the Department of Corrections which is desperately in need of capable workers and he recently retired at 90% pay. As soon as he retired he was asked to return making even more money than before on top of his retirement. After about a year of this they are finally having to try to fill the jobs with non-retired personnel due to our budget problems. It was great while it lasted :) although sad for tax payers.

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  3. And all those years I paid into social security won't count when I retire because I *now* have a pension. They don't want people "double dipping" when it comes to retirement pay.

    It's called the Windfall Elimination Provision. As if my getting back what I paid into social security is some sort of windfall.

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