Kicking the can down the road on unfunded pension liabilities for local governments is coming to an end. The fund managers can only cannibalize the corpus of the fund or borrow against it (same thing) for so long. And time is running out!
The Dallas, TX Police retirement fund is about to file bankruptcy. Many local property taxpayers, trying to cover their own retirement, are going to start to be handed the bill to make sure the often rich retirement benefits for government employees, are well covered.
So where does your local government body stand? They nor local media will tell you the truth, especially with the plummeting interest rates they are earning and the insatiable benefits their labor unions are negotiating for them.
The Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB) has recently (post 6/30/2014) required all government agencies to disclose critical data on their local unfunded pension liabilities in their annual audits. You can glean the critical data from your local government body’s audit and input it into our new spreadsheet program. From there it will provide you, at current interest rates (which have been getting worse regularly), a much more accurate picture of their unfunded pension liability.
To get started download our file here.
Read the Instructions on the first tab, input the data from the audit on the second tab and it will generate the final report for you on the third tab.