ShareThisBy JOHN HILL
Sunday, November 19, 2006
The state's retirement system won't take "no" for an answer.
A committee of the California Public Employees Retirement System voted Tuesday to urge the Legislature to once again consider bills that would make it easier to crack down on fraud in disability pensions.
CalPERS sponsored the same legislation in 2004. But despite unanimous passage by legislative committees and the two houses, the bills were quietly shelved.
The CalPERS legislation would for the first time make it a crime to commit fraud in trying to get a disability pension.
It would allow CalPERS to require medical re-examinations of disability retirees who are over retirement age. And it would allow CalPERS investigators to glean employment information about retirees held by other state agencies.
CalPERS officials said they feel strongly enough about the benefits of the proposed legislation that they wanted to try again.
"We felt that it was important to bring it back to the board this year," Daniel Brown, a CalPERS manager, told the Benefit and Program Administration Committee.
The CalPERS board first sponsored the legislation in December 2004 in response to a Bee investigation about the apparent abuse of the medical pension system by some state workers.
The resulting package of bills was passed by both houses and returned to the Assembly for concurrence in amendments.
Then it hit a wall when the author, Assemblyman Alberto Torrico, D-Newark, asked to shelve it.
Assemblyman Roger Niello, R-Fair Oaks, failed in a last-ditch attempt to revive one of the bills, making it a crime to lie to get a disability pension.
Democrats said they didn't want "piecemeal" reform of the state's pension system, and were uncertain what direction Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted to take.
But a spokesman for Schwarzenegger said any bill that addressed fraud should be passed right away.
