The NMI Retirement Fund remains short of funds to pay off retirees\u2019 pension this week.<\/p>\n
Fund administrator Karl T. Reyes said they still need $1.4 million to fully pay the Dec. 30 pension obligations.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have not gotten the money. We need to have it by tomorrow [Wednesday] to transfer electronically. It should be in two days before Dec. 30 to ensure they [pensioners] get it on time,\u201d said Reyes.<\/p>\n
He said the Fund needs a total of $2.3 million for the last pension payment of the year.<\/p>\n
The Fund has some 2,000 member retirees. Retirees receive a minimum of $6,000 a year or $500 every month.<\/p>\n
The CNMI government does not provide any maximum limit to the pension payment. Right now, the Fund said that the highest paid retiree gets $162,000 a year. This was recently increased to about $168,000 due to the 2 percent hike in the cost of living allowance this year.<\/p>\n
In 2006, when the COLA rate is raised to 4 percent, the retiree would be getting some $171,000 a year in pension payments or over $3,200 every 10 days.<\/p>\n
The Fund declined to reveal the identity of the retiree. Sources said, though, that the retiree comes from the Judicial Branch of government.<\/p>\n
Mostly people in the medical and legal profession receive over $100,000 in annual compensation.<\/p>\n
Meantime, Reyes said that the highest pension claim would continue to rise unless the government sets a limit to it.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe asked the Legislature to set a maximum limit in the law [Public Law 13-60] but they didn\u2019t approve it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Reyes said the Fund asked that the maximum pension be set at $85,000 a year.<\/p>\n
The Fund earlier said that, besides one retiree who is getting nearly $200,000, a couple of people are getting over $100,000 and some are getting close to $100,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The NMI Retirement Fund remains short of funds to pay off retirees\u2019 pension this 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-96671","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\/96671","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=96671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96671\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=96671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=96671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=96671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}