Increasing the amount of employer contributions and deferring payments to members starting this fiscal year could immediately save the NMI Retirement Fund’s deteriorating condition, according to the pension agency.<\/p>\n
In documents submitted to the Legislature, the Fund said that increasing the employee and employer contributions could result in an infusion of $42.4 million that will help prolong the pension program’s lifespan by eight years.<\/p>\n
In its analysis provided to lawmakers, the Fund recommends 100 percent deferral of payments above a certain amount to reduce the pension drawdowns starting this fiscal year.<\/p>\n
Under its projection, if the Fund withdraws $53 million from its portfolio each fiscal year, the program’s lifespan will only be until September 2014. If drawdowns go down to $42.2 million a year, this will extend that to May 2015.<\/p>\n
If payments are deferred and contributions are increased as recommended, and by capping drawdowns at only $26.5 million a year, the Fund will live until May 2017. Dropping the annual drawdown to only $10.6 million will further extend the Fund’s lifespan to May 2025.<\/p>\n
The Fund has an asset portfolio valued at only $256.7 million as of Dec. 31. Because of a court order that requires the agency to set aside $113 million for active government employees, this leaves only $143.7 million that is available to pay for members’ benefits.<\/p>\n
The lifespan of the pension program is projected to last less than three years, based on its current portfolio and with no new money expected to come into the Fund.<\/p>\n
$80.7M expenses<\/strong><\/p>\n In fiscal year 2011, the Fund incurred a $50-million shortfall, with expenditures amounting to $80.7 million against only $30.4 million in revenue. To balance this, some $53 million was withdrawn from the Fund’s investments to pay for pensions and benefits.<\/p>\n Documents obtained by the Saipan Tribune show that the bulk of the $80.7 million spent last year went to benefit payments totaling to $76.016 million: $61.6 million for retirement\/survivors’ pension; $1.4 million for disability payments; $67,361 for death lump sum payments; $8.031 million for health and life insurance; $130,246 for cost of living allowance; and $4.6 million for refunds.<\/p>\n Additionally, the Fund spent $3.1 million on professional fees, $1.1 million on personnel expenses, and $393,876 on other general and administrative costs.<\/p>\n Meantime, based on unaudited figures, revenue last fiscal year amounted to $30.4 million, of which $21.1 million came from employee and employer contributions. Employee contributions totaled $8 million; employer contributions amounted to $13.1 million.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Increasing the amount of employer contributions and deferring payments to members starting this fiscal year…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}