What is PERA hiding?

by Natalie | 12:46 pm, March 13, 2010 | Comments Off

Recent news that the Public Employees’ Retirement Association (PERA) needs a $24 – $30 billion dollar bailout from taxpayers aroused my curiosity.

My unusual hobby is requesting the spending and salary information of various government entities. I post the information on my website, www.nataliementen.com, in a searchable database for others to use and analyze.

I requested from PERA administration records of their credit card spending for the past two years. I asked for electronic documents, i.e. spreadsheets, that would include the cardholder’s name, date, amount, the merchant and a transaction description, e.g. office supplies. The request went to the legal department.

PERA replied that their electronic documents don’t show merchants or descriptions.

PERA claimed the only credit card spending records they have listing merchant’s names would be 7500 pages of paper copies and cost me only $3,375 to get two years of data.

The $3,375 cost included attorneys redacting confidential spending records at a cost of $70 per hour (estimated 20 hours), and the clerical staff, at a cost of $20 per hour (estimated 5 hours), to assemble the paper. Also, PERA would charge 25 cents a sheet to reproduce the records, or $1,875 in copy charges.

PERA’s definition of confidential spending records includes those that pertain to attorney-client privilege. This made me wonder what privilege would exist in credit card spending documents that only list a cardholder’s name, the merchant, date and amount. PERA informed me at the beginning that no transaction description or reason would be listed.

I don’t want to spend $3,375 to see redacted records where I can’t tell if it has concealed a $500 dinner at Morton’s Steak House because PERA felt it fell under attorney-client privilege. You may think that’s ridiculous, but it’s shocking how our government spends money and why they fight so hard to cover it up.

I tried to figure out how to reduce the $3,375 cost to acquire their credit card spending records and asked PERA which banks issued their cards. They replied Wells Fargo and American Express. I called both banks and they allow any cardholder to download charges, which includes which business or merchant a charge was made at, to a spreadsheet. I asked PERA if they’d download their charges to an Excel spreadsheet in order to reduce charging me $1875 to make paper copies.

PERA refused what I think was a reasonable request and seems determined to make it cost prohibitive. It’s obvious that PERA doesn’t want to produce spending records in electronic form that I can disclose to the public on my website.

I also submitted a request for PERA’s employee names, their 2009 salary, job title, benefits, bonuses, and performance incentives. PERA informed me they believe they have the statutory right to conceal every employee’s name that works for PERA administration. They did say I could have information citing salaries, job titles, bonuses and performance incentives. That record search would cost me $92 for labor and copy fees for eight pages of paper records. I asked for electronic information, but they implied I might manipulate it.

I’m insulted at their inference, but was determined and a couple hours after having received the data I had entered all of the 236 PERA employee’s salaries and performance incentives into a spreadsheet without modification.

You can now visit my website and view PERA’s employee salaries yourself.

The ten highest paid employees at PERA make a combined annual salary of $2.3 million (the lowest salary being $191,610 and the highest at 280,000), excluding benefits or perks.

The fifty highest salaries including performance incentives average $148,306, excluding benefits or perks.

It should alarm elected officials, taxpayers and PERA beneficiaries that PERA will not disclose their employees’ names. PERA invests a tremendous amount of money from public workers’ retirement contributions and taxpayers’ matching funds, thought it’s hard to call it matching funds as taxpayers contribute a higher percentage than a government employee to their retirement account.  If we don’t know who works for PERA than how are we to determine if a PERA investment employee is or isn’t investing in a company that benefits them personally on the side? What if that employee is investing in their brother-in-law’s corporation?

PERA wants billions for a bailout and won’t show us their credit card spending without $3375 in cash from a taxpayer to pay for it?  Taxpayers aren’t allowed to see who works at PERA?  Something is wrong.

Let the citizenry be the judge. That’s they way it should be in a republic!

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