Due to the rising costs of health care and health insurance, pressure from union bargaining partners, and the application of the “equal contribution rule” for public agencies that provide health coverage through CalPERS, many California cities and special districts...
By Jeff Chang A recently issued IRS private letter ruling may provide public agencies and their employees with another way to give employees more control over the types of retirement benefits they will eventually receive. As we previously reported, governmental...
By Jeff Chang Given the current circumstances, many public agencies are finding ways to use health reimbursement arrangements as creative and cost-effective benefits for their employees and former employees. As explained in earlier posts, HRAs possess a number of...
By Jeff Chang As the harsh realities of the coronavirus pandemic, along with its widespread impact on all aspects of daily life, continue to shock and numb us all, many cities have already been identified as “high risk” from a financial stability perspective by the...
By Jeff Chang Several municipal clients adopted retiree health savings plans or post-employment health plans, and continue to have questions about what they are and how they should be administered. Unfortunately, these arrangements are not always fully explained when...
By Jeff Chang Substantial confusion exists about whether the assets of an Internal Revenue Code section 115 trust created to fund pension or OPEB (retiree health) obligations may be used to offset the overall pension or OPEB liabilities that public employers are...
By: Jeff Chang Previously, we wrote about the uses of health reimbursement arrangements and the IRS rules that apply to them. As we explained, an HRA is basically an employer-funded account that may be used for paying specified medical and health costs (including...
By: Jeff Chang Compensatory time off or "comp time" is paid time off taken in lieu of pay. In the case of State and local governments, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) allows them to provide non‑exempt workers with comp time in lieu of overtime. State and local...
By: Jeff Chang Previously, I've written about the pitfalls of giving employees "too much choice" with respect to their pay, their paid time off and other benefits. Employee elections that are not properly designed can unexpectedly result in current taxation under...
By Jeff Chang Group variable annuity contracts are often used to wrap mutual funds to provide greater revenue to plan providers or to provide access to an insurance company's stable value fund. Every public agency 457(b) plan or 401(a) plan that offers a stable value...
By: Jeff Chang The recent Ninth Circuit decision in Flores v. City of San Gabriel focused on the circumstances under which the value of certain non-cash-wage benefits (such as those provided under "cash-in-lieu" programs or cafeteria plans) must be included in the...
By: Jeff Chang Originally published in "The Public Retirement Journal," March-April 2016, and reprinted with permission. So, here's the bad news. Governor Jerry Brown referred to the State's grossly underfunded pension and retiree health obligations in his 2016 State...
By: Jeff Chang For many American workers, the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program serves as an important component of their retirement savings. This is not necessarily the case for the millions of workers whose State, local government and...
By: Jeff Chang One of the more compelling recent trends in the world of tax-deferred savings (i.e., 401(k), 403(b) and 457(b) plans) has been the growth in the use of automatic enrollment, or auto-enrollment, features. In a typical auto-enrollment situation, the...
By: Jeff Chang A recently issued IRS private letter ruling (PLR) puts the kibosh on the fairly common practice of allowing public agency employees to elect whether and at what level to participate in the agency's mandatory contribution pension plan. This plan design...
By: Jeff Chang Because many of our public agency clients have collectively-bargained employees, we continue to see a variety of efforts by employers and their bargaining partners to make the most of limited compensation and benefits dollars. Sometimes, the parties...
By: Jeff Chang Now that the general economic situation and public agency finances appear to be improving, a number of municipalities and special districts are once again looking at their unfunded OPEB (other post-employment benefits) liabilities with an eye to getting...
By: Jeff Chang Sometimes the realities of family budgets – budgets in general – collide with notions of fairness and equal treatment. I can still remember the deep disappointment in the eyes of our youngest child many years ago when we explained that the family would...
By: Jeff Chang This entry comes to you with the help of my colleague Wendy Tauriainen. In our office, we enjoy the inside jokes of the pension and benefits world (yes there actually are jokes). One of them is the label "bitaxual" for those entities that are lucky...
By: Jeff Chang I couldn't help but think of Buzz Lightyear's famous exhortation as I thought about the implications of the appellate court's decision that I had just read – International Brotherhood Of Electrical Workers, Local 1245 v. City Of Redding (2012) 210 Cal....
By: Jeff Chang Although there has been much talk, good and bad, about California's recent attempt at public pension reform, the fact is that the Public Employees Pension Reform Act of 2013 (PEPRA) is now the law of the State and public employers are obliged to comply...
By: Jeff Chang This entry comes to you with the help of my colleague Wendy Tauriainen. A couple of weeks ago we got to talking about the fact that dozens, if not hundreds, of local governments and special districts appeared to be ignoring the proper tax treatment and...
By: Jeff Chang Since the Stanford Institute For Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) issued its latest report on California's public pension spending, a fair amount has been written by those who are seriously concerned about the potentially enormous size of the unfunded...
By: Jeff Chang On November 21, 2011[1], the California Supreme Court answered a question posed to it by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit[2] as part of ongoing federal litigation between the County of Orange and its retirees. In its response,...