Civil servants who joined the government prior to the enactment of the new pension law are exempted from the new policy that requires a minimum of 10 years in government service to be eligible for retirement, the NMI Retirement Fund’s Board of Trustees ruled last week.<\/p>\n
The retirement board defined the scope of Public Law 11-9 in response to the appeal filed by at least 50 claimants who were employed before April 16, 1998, the date when the new pension law went into effect.<\/p>\n
PL 11-9, which amended a previous law, has raised the length of service requirement from three to 10 years to be eligible for retirement. It covers any Class I employee who is at least 62 years old, and was hired not earlier than May 7, 1989.<\/p>\n
The claimants, led by the labor department’s former hearing officer Linn Asper, had protested the Fund Administrator’s position that “the vesting 10 year requirement” of PL 11-9 applies to all employees “who have not yet acquired the three years of vesting service.”<\/p>\n
The board reversed the administrator’s ruling, saying that “employees who were contributing members of the Fund when Public Law 11-9 became effective fall within the protection of the savings clause because, at the minimum those members had existing contract rights established by the statute and protected by the NMI constitution.”<\/p>\n
The board said these employees relied on the original three-year vesting requirement when they accepted jobs in the government.<\/p>\n
The government is “contractually bound” to honor its obligation to provide a pension “without any further modifications or decreases in overall benefit levels,” the board added.<\/p>\n
“The CNMI’s pension case law is still in its infancy,” the board said.<\/p>\n
The CNMI courts have not addressed a similar issue, but the board said it adheres to a modern trend among state tribunals, which is inclined “to protect pension rights.”<\/p>\n
“While this decision may involve an additional financial burden on the government,” the board said, “it is a reasonable resolution of the issue, harmonizing statutory rights and limitations with the NMI’s constitution.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Civil servants who joined the government prior to the enactment of the new pension law are exempted from the new policy that requires a minimum of 10 years in government service to be eligible for retirement, the NMI Retirement Fund’s Board of Trustees ruled last week.<\/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-48516","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\/48516","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=48516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}