Government Employment Ripoff Update - Padding Your Retirement

OffHisMeds recalls (and you may too) that back in 2004 and prior, hundreds if not thousands of Teachers all over Texas were defrauding the Social Security system by working the last month or two of their teaching careers as janitors and other non-teacher positions. They were abetted in this criminal activity by Texas education bureaucrats, who provided them bogus jobs so that they could qualify for a lifetime of Social Security - frequently over $5,000 per year plus COLA - while making a contribution of as little as $5.00.

Oh yeah, and the Teachers paid for the privilege: frequently an under-the-table spiff of $500 or more directly to the school where they were "working". By the Mable Caleb school of accounting, this money was never accounted for.

Why are these acts criminal? Simple. Teachers never paid into Social Security their entire careers. Instead, they had sumptuous pensions and post-retirement health benefits, frequently after working as little as 25 years. So, as OffHisMeds has pointed out countless times - and will never tire of pointing out - government employees generally retire around age 50, and as able-bodied adults go on the luxury dole, never to be useful members of society again.

When caught with their hands in the cookie jar, the reaction of of the Teachers' union and most of its members around the state was nearly universal: "We're entitled to Social Security benefits, too". The fact that this practice was conducted in secret kind of puts the lie to this sense of self-entitlement. Were it otherwise, it would have been done completely above-board and proudly displayed to the tax-paying public. Suffice to say, this was not the case. As is the case with so many other aspects of public sector employment, it was implemented behind closed doors and conducted in the stealth of night.

The saddest thing OffHisMeds has to contemplate every day is the comprehensive stupidity of such an outlook, particularly since he counts amongst his friends more Teachers than any other profession - by far. To be blind to the simple math that shows how unsustainable berserk public sector employment proves to be is one thing; to be blind to the Ethics of this issue - and particularly efforts to underhandedly inflate one's income - is another.

These are the folks that are educating our children, and I suspect few of them has ever contemplated how ludicrous it is for government workers to cash in their chips as early as their mid-forties, yet expect everybody else in society to work until at least their sixties or seventies - and all so that they can pay the pensions of a bunch of lazy slackers. For Teachers to instruct our children that such fraud is not only sustainable but morally right is yet another indignity heaped on taxpayers, whose hyper-inflated property taxes are being used to abet such indoctrination.

Which brings us to the latest example of public sector employment fraud: padding your retirement salary base. As should be commonly known, government pensions are calculated based on final salary. Most often, this is based on an average of the last 3 to 5 years' salary, but frequently it is based on the last year of employment. What is coming to light is the practice of "padding" one's last year of employment with excessive overtime, generally abetted by the employee's superiors. If this is sounding like a version of the Social Security Teacher's scam, it's because it is.

With this simple bookkeeping trick, a government employee can jack his base salary up as much as 50% or more, and qualify for a pension far higher that what was contracted for - or deserved. Granted, this story is about state employees in New York, but can Texas be far behind getting the same scrutiny? How many stories do we need to hear about bus drivers and cops knocking down $140,000 per year before folks start connecting the dots? Remember, former Mayor Bill White jacked up police department spending by 60% without putting one additional cop on the streets.

Stay tuned for more details on this latest scandal in public employment. Few of the details are known, but I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction: not only will this practice be found to be widespread, but much of the so-called "overtime" the employees were credited for will be found to be fraudulent as well, making this practice a veritable "Triple Dipper". You heard that term here first, so let's define it:

Triple Dipper: A government employee who abuses the taxpayer by a) receiving pay and benefits well in excess of what the market will bear; b) inflates his salary with the collusion of superiors by the fraudulent manipulation of overtime; and c) uses that inflated salary to defraud the pension system.

This may well be better than the term "Mable Caleb".