Fix the pension-spiking practices

Pension Spiking: Go back and fix it. Once a problem has been identified, the solution becomes clear. Not so in the case of the recent articles on pension spiking, which is the practice of increasing a government employee of public teacher salary by unusually high amounts in their final working year(s) to magnify their pension payouts.

The solution is simple: Bring in auditors to open up the books, identify the recipients of these pension-enhancing increases, and scale back the final year pay increases to what a younger person received on average in the particular year. Then these workers would receive pensions that reflect their final compensation based on an average final year increase rather than a greatly inflated one.

While taxpayers appreciate the media for identifying these past pension abuses that are bankrupting our state, they should call for retroactive adjustments to rid the system of the continuing cost of the fraud.

It's a good bet most taxpayers would say: “Good. You stopped this practice. That will prevent future pension fraud. But now go back and undo what was done previously: Scale back the final pay and deflate the pension payouts to what they would have been if the abuse had not occurred.”

Larry Grogan

Glendale Heights