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Gen X Retirements At Risk? Not So Fast, Says EBRI

Even smart people can disagree with each other. Who knew?

A great example of that sentiment is playing out right now, as a handful of nationally renowned retirement research groups have found each other at odds with the other’s conclusions about the retirement security of the next few waves of retirees.

Retirement savings (or a lack there-of) have been getting a lot of press lately. The Federal Reserve recently released data that suggested 20 percent of people aged 55-64 had zero money saved for retirement. All in all, 31 percent of people surveyed said they had no retirement savings at all.

Two other recent studies make similarly striking claims—a 2013 Pew Charitable Trusts study found that newer retirees would have far less income during retirement than their baby boomer predecessors. Likewise, a 2012 study by the Center for Retirement Research (CRR) found nearly half of households in their 50’s were “at risk” for a rocky retirement.

But the Employee Benefit Research Institute doesn’t think the situation is so dire. In fact, the EBRI has gone so far as to rebuff the findings of those latter two studies. From ThinkAdvisor:

EBRI recently challenged a pair of studies that concluded Gen Xers’ retirement prospects were in worse shape than boomers’ prospects, pointing out also that the oldest Gen Xers are only 49, with many earnings years left before they reach traditional retirement age.

EBRI charges that some studies used flawed assumptions or bad methodologies to reach their conclusion that investors born between 1965 and 1974 had a smaller likelihood of saving enough for retirement than older investors born between 1948 and 1964.

“Calculating retirement income adequacy is very complex, and it’s important to use reasonable assumptions and current data if you want credible results,” Jack VanDerhei, EBRI research director and author of the report, said in a statement.

More on the “flawed assumptions” used in the Pew and CRR studies:

EBRI took issue with a 2013 study by Pew Charitable Trusts that found the median replacement rate for Gen Xers who retire at 65 would be 32 percentage points lower than early boomers’ and nine points lower than later boomers’.

However, that finding “explicitly ignores future contributions,” EBRI argued. “EBRI’s analysis concludes that ignoring decades of potential future contributions (as the Pew study does) exaggerates the percentage of Gen X workers simulated to run short of money in retirement by roughly 10 to 12 percentage points among all but the lowest-income group,” according to the report.

An earlier study, conducted in 2012 by the Center for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College, found 44% of households in their 50s were “at risk,” compared with 55% of those in their 40s and 62% of those in their 30s.

In that report, CRR failed to consider the effect of automatic enrollment and escalation features, which were widely adopted following the Pension Protection Act of 2006. Gen X is the first generation to have a full working career in a defined contribution environment, EBRI noted.

EBRI says all its recent research points to very different conclusions than other studies: Generation Xers are facing approximately the same retirement prospects as the Boomers’.

EBRI concludes that 60 percent of Generation X won’t run out of money in retirement.

Is the Retirement Savings Crisis Too “Hyped”? These Researchers Think So.

A seemingly routine Capitol Hill hearing got very interesting very fast late last month. The hearing was held by the Ways and Means Social Security Subcommittee and focused on the state of retirement savings in the U.S.

Why was it so interesting? Two of the witnesses, Sylvester J. Schieber and Andrew G. Biggs, insisted that the retirement savings “crisis” in the U.S. is over-hyped. (They were referencing, among other things, the recent government statistics claiming that 20 percent of Americans aged 55-64 had zero retirement savings).

An outpouring of criticism followed, led by Christian Weller, who wrote:

Launched by Chairman Sam Johnson (R-TX), the hearing announcement made reference to retirement income being underreported, implying that families are better off than the data show. Moreover, the witness list included crisis deniers, such as the American Enterprise Institute’s Andrew Biggs, making claims that the number of households inadequately prepared for retirement is largely overstated. Some testimony turned to calls for Social Security benefit cuts. Because, after all, cutting Social Security would theoretically inflict little harm if families are already well prepared for retirement. In reality, families would suffer tremendously from Social Security cuts. Why? Because as a long-standing body of economic research has repeatedly shown, there is indeed a growing crisis.

Schieber and Biggs (who, by the way, are no slouches–you can read their bios at the bottom of this post) quickly took to the blogosphere to explain their position.

First, they tackled why they disputed the government data, released last week, that suggested one in five Americans nearing retirement had no money at all saved for retirement. From Sheiber and Biggs (S + B):

These [Social Security Administration] publications rely on data from the Current Population Survey, which omits the vast majority of income that seniors receive from IRA and 401(k) accounts and thus makes seniors appear significantly poorer and less prepared for retirement than they actually are.

IRS tax data, which include all forms of pension withdrawals, show that true incomes for middle class retirees receiving Social Security benefits are substantially higher than is believed. The fact that these faulty SSA statistics were cited by the Social Security Subcommittee’s ranking member, apparently without knowledge of the limitations of these data, is evidence that even policymakers’ understanding of retirement security can be improved.

What about National Retirement Research Index’s findings that 6 in 10 Americans are at risk of an insecure retirement? S + B write:

With due respect to the NRRI’s authors, we have already detailed how the NRRI sets a higher bar for retirement income adequacy than most financial advisors and how it ignores the ways that family size and structure play into retirement saving patterns. In addition, the NRRI projects current workers’ future incomes using a one-size-fits-all pattern that ignores the dispersion in earnings that takes place from middle age onward.

This assumption erroneously reduces the “replacement rates” that low earners will receive from Social Security. The NRRI also predicts that traditional defined benefit pension plans will continue to contract, but assumes that future retirees will have no larger IRA or 401(k)s accumulations than those of people who retired prior to 2010. Together, these factors substantially – but erroneously, in our view – increase the share of workers considered to be “at risk” of an insecure retirement.

So who are these people anyway?

Sylvester J. Schieber:

Sylvester J. Schieber is Chairman of the Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) and a private consultant on retirement and health issues. He retired from Watson Wyatt Worldwide in September 2006 where had served as Vice President/U.S. Director of Benefit Consulting and Director of Research and Information. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Notre Dame in 1974. He has served on the Board of Directors of the Pension Research Council at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania since 1985. Dr. Schieber was a member of the 1994-1996 Social Security Advisory Council. In January 1998 he was appointed to a six-year term on the Social Security Advisory Board.

Andrew Biggs:

Andrew G. Biggs is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he studies Social Security reform, state and local government pensions, and public sector pay and benefits.

Before joining AEI, Biggs was the principal deputy commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA), where he oversaw SSA’s policy research efforts. In 2005, as an associate director of the White House National Economic Council, he worked on Social Security reform. In 2001, he joined the staff of the President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security.

You can read their entire blog post here.

You can also read the initial blog post, “Yes, There Is A Retirement Crisis”.

It’s a fascinating discussion, although at this moment, it seems to be two men standing alone against a world of data.

The Lawsuit That Could Legalize Pay-To-Play For Pension Fund Investments

Here’s a scenario to chew on:

An investment firm makes a campaign contribution to a city mayor. Later, the mayor appoints members to the city’s pension board. The pension board decides to hire the aforementioned investment firm to handle the pension fund’s investments.

Does something seem fishy about that situation?

The SEC says yes, and they have rules in place to prevent those “pay-to-play” scenarios.

But a recent lawsuit says no: investment managers should be able to donate money to whichever politicians they choose, even if those donations could present a conflict of interest down the line.

The lawsuit, filed last week by Republican committees from New York and Tennessee against the SEC, wants the court to affirm that political donations are free speech—and, by extension, current SEC pay-to-play rules are unconstitutional.

Under the SEC’s current rules, investment advisors can’t make donations to politicians that have any influence—direct or indirect—over the hiring of investment firms.

In many states, it’s the job of the governor or mayor to appoint members to the state or city’s pension board—the entity that controls pension funds’ investment decisions.

The lawsuit claims that it’s not fair to make investment firm employees choose between their career and their First Amendment rights.

But does the lawsuit have a shot?

If past court decisions are any indication, it certainly has a fighting chance. David Frum writes:

It’s a good guess that the federal courts will listen sympathetically to the challenge to the SEC rule. The Supreme Court has made clear that campaign contributions are protected free speech, both for individuals and for corporations. While protecting against corruption remains a valid basis for restricting contributions, the Court has defined corruption narrowly: In the words of the majority opinion in McCutcheon v. FEC, the most recent major campaign-finance case, corruption is “an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder’s official duties.” And as Justice John Roberts wrote in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, the courts “must err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it.” It seems very conceivable that the courts will find the SEC rule overly broad.

It should be noted, the SEC didn’t put these rules in place for no reason.

Over the course of a few years in the mid-2000’s, then-New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi accepted over $1 million in campaign donations and gifts from investment firm Markstone Capital.

Hevesi, who at the time was the sole trustee of the New York State Common Retirement Fund, subsequently decided that the Fund should make a $250 million investment with Markstone.

Hevesi eventually pled guilty to corruption charges and served a little less than two years in prison. He is banned from holding public office again. The case was the catalyst for the pay-to-play rules the SEC currently has in place.

But Frum, in a piece written for the Atlantic today, wonders aloud whether the SEC rule targets the right people. Frum writes:

It’s a valid question whether the SEC rule is actually achieving anything.

The people with the most sway over state pension-funds decisions are not always—nor even often—elected officials. And those who exert the most effective influence over them are not always—nor even often—campaign contributors.

Frum points that it’s often placement agents who are helping to pull strings from behind the scenes. That’s been the case in California, Dallas, New Mexico and Kentucky, and those are just the high-profile ones.

From Frum:

In our belief that it’s politicians who are always and everywhere to blame for everything that goes wrong in a political system, we consign to the financial pages the abundant evidence that the most fundamental vulnerability of state pension plans to corrupt influence is located less in politicians’ need for campaign funds, and much more in the weak governance of state pension plans themselves.

As the New York Republicans’ case against the SEC winds its way through the courts, and if it begins to succeed, you’ll hear a lot of agitated discussion about what this all means for campaign finance, for Chris Christie, and for American elections. But the most important trouble—and the most disturbing practices—are located quite elsewhere. It will be worth keeping that in mind.

That doesn’t necessarily mean, however, that the SEC rule should be repealed and the floodgates opened.

It just means that the stuff happening behind closed doors—the opaque world of placement agents—is what we should be worried about, too.

Here’s a summary of current pay-to-play regulation:

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Photo by Truthout.org via Flickr CC License

Michigan To Sell Record Number of Bonds to Finance Pension Shortfalls

640px-Kalamazoo — Kalamazoo is just one Michigan city considering a historic bond offering to cover pension obligations.

It’s a strategy that’s becoming increasingly common—municipalities, straddled with outstanding pension obligations, issue bonds to cover near-term funding shortfalls.

In a particularly risky iteration of the practice, cities and states will take the proceeds from selling the bonds and re-invest them into the market.

That’s exactly what Michigan is gearing up to do, according to Bloomberg:

The Detroit suburb of Macomb County plans a $270 million sale of municipal debt, its biggest ever, to finance retiree health-care costs, while Kalamazoo is considering a historic $100 million bond offer for similar expenses. Bloomfield Hills plans to borrow a record $17 million for pensions. The law allowing the practice expires Dec. 31.

U.S. states and cities are struggling with how to pay for promises to workers after the recession ravaged their finances. Yet few communities see debt as the answer — sales of revenue-backed pension bonds have tallied $356 million this year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Interest rates close to five-decade lows are making it more attractive to pursue the risky strategy of investing borrowed funds in financial markets.

“We can’t afford to wait,” said Peter Provenzano, Macomb County finance director. “Timing the market is difficult. You could sit on the sidelines and miss out on an opportunity.”

It’s a risky strategy that’s been covered many times before, perhaps best by the Center for Retirement Research’s recent brief.

The gist: If a city is going to re-invest proceeds from issued debt, they better hope the market produces returns that exceed the cost of servicing the debt.

The problem is, most cities that turn to this practice are already in dire straits fiscally. If the bet doesn’t pay off, it leaves cities even worse off.

At least one Michigan city is shying away from the practice: Grand Rapids.

“The best way to have odds in your favor is to do this when stock prices are depressed,” Scott Buhrer, the city’s chief financial officer, told Bloomberg. “We’re in the latter stage of a bull market.”

Photo: “Kalamazoo” by User Mxobe on en.wikipedia – own-work. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

After String of Failed Investments, New Orleans Pulls Money From Police Budget To Cover Pension Funding Shortfalls

The New Orleans City Council voted today to dip into the Police Department’s budget and transfer $2 million to the Fire Fighters Pension and Relief Fund (FPRF), a fund which was been devastated by investment losses in recent years (more on those losses below).

The vote was unanimous, as the state Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that the city had to cover the fund’s funding shortfalls after neglecting to make tens of millions of dollars worth of required payments into the system.

But city officials claim the $2 million pulled from the police budget will have little effect on operations. From NOLA.com:

Led by Councilwoman Stacy Head, who sponsored the move, the council stressed that the re-appropriation won’t hurt police operations.

The department’s 2014 budget was built on the assumption that the NOPD would be adding hundreds of officers this year, said Councilman Jason Williams. Those officers haven’t materialized.

The council’s move to shift the money earmarked for the new officers is merely a recognition of that fact, he said.

“It’s like we bought food for a family of five but there are only two people in the house,” Williams said.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu had promised to add 150 officers to the department this year, but so far the department has produced only a single training academy class of fewer than 30 people.

Thanks in large part to those empty staffing positions, Head said, the NOPD is currently running a surplus of about $9 million.

The Firefighter’s Fund is in a precarious position due to a confluence of several factors, including 1) the city’s aforementioned neglect of its required annual contributions and, 2) severe investment losses over recent years.

Trustees of the Firefighters Fund claim that, between 2010 and 2013, New Orleans shorted payments by $54 million.

As far as investments go, the Fund has had its fair share of failures, according to an audit released this year.

[The auditor’s report can be read in full at the bottom of this post.]

In 2008, the fund invested $15 million in a Cayman Islands-based hedge fund, Fletcher International Ltd. But the hedge fund went bankrupt and New Orleans lost 100 percent of its investment. Richard Rainey reports:

[The investment] initially showed 12-percent annual gains, according to the audit. When the pension board tried to collect some of its apparent earnings in April 2011, it got no answer, according to the audit. Fletcher would file for bankruptcy in October 2012, leading the fund’s auditors to report the $15 million lost in 2013, Meagher said.

But that wasn’t even the FPRF’s biggest investment loss. That honor goes to a failing golf course, as Richard Rainey explains:

[The fund’s] biggest hit last year came from a failing golf course in Algiers. The Lakewood Golf Club, valued at more than $39.2 million in 2012, lost $17.5 million of its worth by December. Another golf course, this one in Austin, lost the fund another $3.5 million last year. Both sites are in the process of being put up for sale, Meagher said.

All told, the Fund lost $40 million in 2013. Since 2010, the Fund has lost 51 percent of its value.

You can read the full auditor’s report, originally obtained by The Times-Picayune, below:

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Photo by Wally Gobetz via Flickr CC

School Contributions to NY Teachers Retirement System To Increase Next Year; Marks 58% Bump Since 2012

The New York State Teacher’s Retirement System announced Wednesday that school district contribution rates will increase by 8 percent next year, rising from 16.25 percent to 17.53 percent.

[The official announcement can be seen embedded at the bottom of this post.]

The new contribution rate doesn’t go into effect until the fall of 2015.

Including the latest increase, school district contribution rates have increase 58 percent since 2012—the contribution rate in 2012 was 11.05 percent, according to the Public Fund Survey.

That’s partially because the System is paying out more pension benefits than ever before; NYSTRS will pay out $6.3 billion in pensions in fiscal year 2014-15, according to the System’s spokesman. In 2009-10, that number was $5.3 billion.

The NYSTRS, once fully funded, has been on a steady decline for years.

The funded ratio has since dropped to 89.8%, according to the most recent data available.

Here’s the official announcement from the NYSTRS:

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Canada Pension Plan’s Quarterly Returns Come Up Short; New $500 Million Investment On Horizon

The numbers are in for the Canada Pension Plan’s investment performance over the first quarter of fiscal year 2015, and the country’s largest pension fund probably isn’t thrilled with the results.

The CPP returned 1.6 percent over the three month period ended June 30. Far from disastrous, the performance still falls short of its peers: the median return of Canadian pension funds over the same period was 3 percent.

In a statement, Canada Pension Chief Executive Mark Wiseman said: “All of our programs reported positive investment returns during the quarter and we continued to further diversify the portfolio globally across various asset classes.”

To that end, the Canada Pension Plan’s Investment Board also announced today that it will be allocating an additional $500 million to investments in the U.S. industrial sector.

Specifically, the investments are in warehouse facilities in high-demand areas of California that will subsequently be leased out. From a CPP press release:

The six logistics and warehouse developments GNAP has committed to are:

GLC Oakland – 375,000-square-foot Class-A warehouse distribution facility recently completed in Oakland, California, adjacent to the Oakland International Airport.

GLC Rancho Cucamonga – two warehouse distribution facilities totaling up to 1.6 million square feet in Rancho Cucamonga, California, 40 miles west of Los Angeles, in the Inland Empire West submarket.

Commerce Center Eastvale – three logistics warehouses providing in excess of 2.5 million square feet located in Eastvale, California, 50 miles west of Los Angeles, in the Inland Empire West submarket.

GLC Fontana – 640,000-square-foot warehouse distribution facility located in Fontana, California, 50 miles west of Los Angeles, in the Inland Empire West submarket.

GLC Compton – 100,000-square-foot distribution facility in Compton, California, a prime infill location within the South Bay submarket of Los Angeles.

GLC Santa Fe Springs – three warehouse distribution facilities totalling up to 1.2 million square feet located in Santa Fe Springs, California, a prime infill location within the Mid-Counties submarket in Los Angeles.

The CPP already had allocated $400 million to the Goodman North American Partnership (GNAP), a joint venture formed between the CPP Investment Board and Goodman Group.

Photo: “Canada blank map” by Lokal_Profil. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons

Judge: Florida Violated Open Records Laws When It Stonewalled Pension Record Requests, Sent Investigators To Man’s Home In “Chilling” Incident

Over the last few years, Curtis Lee—Jacksonville resident and retired pension attorney—has filed dozens upon dozens of public record requests relating to the Jacksonville Police and Fire Pension Fund.

But Lee claims that instead of getting access to the public records he requested, he was stonewalled by the State Attorney’s Office for the Fourth Judicial District.

In one instance, says Lee, the Office waited a full year to provide an initial response to his requests. In another, the Office sent investigators to Lee’s home to tell him to stop contacting the Office and to question him as to his purpose for requesting the documents.

So Lee filed a lawsuit against the Office alleging they violated public records laws with their actions.

And the law gave Lee some solace this week when a judge sharply criticized the Office and ruled that they will have to pay for all of Lee’s legal fees. The judge, however, did not rule that the Office intentionally broke public records laws, which would have carried more serious penalties. More from the Florida Times-Union:

A judge ruled State Attorney Angela Corey’s office broke Florida’s public-records law, scolding the prosecutor’s office for sending investigators to question the citizen in his home and never demonstrating why the unusual visit was “necessary and appropriate.”

…

Judge Karen Cole also criticized Corey’s office for refusing to accept Lee’s cash for records and in some cases taking more than a year to provide even an initial response.
The State Attorney’s Office will have to pay Lee’s legal fees for his lawsuit against it. Cole will need to figure out exactly how much that is. Lee’s attorney, Brooks Rathet, said it should be somewhere around $20,000.

The State Attorney’s Office also violated public records laws by requiring the public to pay for records with business checks, cashier’s checks or money orders. Cash and debit cards were not accepted.

To get a money order, Lee and others had to pay a third-party service a fee. That, Cole said, “unlawfully burdens” citizens. From now on, the State Attorney’s Office has to accept cash for records. If the office wants to, the judge said, it can also allow other types of payment.

Cole also described how the State Attorney’s Office violated the law by taking too long with its response to requests.

As one example described, Lee sent Corey’s office six letters with 27 categories of public records requests in February 2011.

About five days later, two State Attorney’s Office investigators came to Lee’s door, according to Judge Karen Cole’s final judgment.

Sending investigators to tell someone to stop calling the State Attorney’s Office “would have a chilling effect,” Cole wrote, for most people. Most people might not have continued requesting records after a visit like that, she wrote.

After the judgment, the Office told Lee that they would produce the records he had requested by Thursday, August 14.

Lee filed a similar lawsuit against the Jacksonville Police and Fire Pension Fund. Lee won certain aspects of that case, but the case is now being appealed to the Supreme Court by the fund.

New Jersey Voters Weigh In On Pension Reform Policy Options In New Poll

Unlike most states, New Jersey’s pension system gets ample press in state news programs and publications. And with airtime comes debate—meaning that every New Jersey voter, by now, has an idea of whether they approve of Chris Christie’s string of pension-related decisions stretching back to May.

A recent poll, conducted by Quinnipiac University, gave voters a chance to voice those views.

From the results, one thing is clear: when it comes to Gov. Christie’s “no pain, no gain” approach to pension reform, voters want the “gain”. But they aren’t too keen on the “pain” part of that equation.

Note: the poll asked voters their opinions on various policy options to fix the state’s pension funding situation. Sharp-eyed readers will notice there were no questions regarding the state making larger payments to the fund. That’s because it’s unlikely that particular policy option will even be proposed; Christie has said this new round of pension reforms will focus on cuts to worker benefits and/or tax increases elsewhere. Hence the “no pain, no gain” slogan assigned to Christie’s push for reform.

To start, most voters agree that pensions for New Jersey’s public employees are too high (47 percent). Surprisingly, that number increases along with age: just 42 percent of voters in the 18-34 age bracket think pension are too high. But 49 percent of voters over 55 years old think that public pension benefits are excessive.

But the same voters didn’t think pensioners should be made to accept lower benefits. Overall, 55 percent of respondents disapproved of the idea of making workers accept lower pensions in exchange for higher taxes, which would be used to shore up the pension system’s funding issues. Only 33 percent agreed with that proposal.

When it comes to making voters choose between raising retirement age or increasing contribution rates for public employees, the consensus was clear: raising the retirement age was unpopular (only 31 percent approval) while increasing contributions was much more acceptable (52 percent approval).

Finally, voters were asked which policy options they preferred to help fund the pension system. The options: increase taxes or reduce pension benefits.

As it turns out, neither policy option is particularly popular. Only 12 percent support increasing taxes, and only 26 percent think worker benefits should be decreased. A combination of the two policies was more popular amongst voters (52 percent would approve of a combination of tax hikes and benefit cuts).

The poll was conducted with 1,148 New Jersey voters contacted between July 31 and Aug. 4.The margin of error for the poll was plus or minus 2.9 percent.

You can read a summary of the poll results here.

Providence Mayor Tries to Stall Deposition Until After Election in Lawsuit Over Pension Actuarial Errors

Early in 2013, Providence filed a lawsuit against the actuarial firm, Buck Consultants, that had served as the city’s actuary for the previous 90 years.

It takes a pretty serious falling out to break off such a long-standing relationship, but Providence is alleging that Buck made a serious mistake when crunching the numbers behind the city’s recent set of pension reforms.

When the city was designing its pension reforms, it asked Buck to calculate how much the city would save from various policies, namely the suspension of cost-of-living increases. So that’s what Buck did.

But the city alleges that Buck made serious mathematical errors in its estimations, overstating the city’s savings by $700,000 a year and in turn boosting its pension liabilities by $10.8 million over the next 28 years.

The court case is now underway, and the time has come for Mayor Taveras to be deposed. But Taveras says he needs to wait until after the Sep. 9^thgubernatorial primary to answer questions under oath. Buck says “no way.” From the Providence Journal:

The city last week filed an emergency motion for a protective order seeking to postpone until after the primary election Taveras’ questioning under oath about his decisions regarding changes to the city’s retirement system. It asked, too, that U.S. District Chief Judge William E. Smith limit his deposition to three hours, given the “press of city business.”

…

Buck Consultants LLC — which performed financial analyses for the city since 1920 — argues that Taveras’ deposition is imperative to its defense against the city’s lawsuit.

Buck looks to question Taveras, who it identifies as the central witness in the case, not only about his decision-making in pushing for an ordinance suspending cost-of-living increases for retirees but also statements he has made in the course of his campaign for governor. Buck asserts that its lawyers should be allowed to depose Taveras “while the campaign is ongoing” based on his comments.

“Mayor Taveras is not a mere bystander to this dispute,” Buck writes. “As the City’s highest elected official, he is a critically important witness.”

What could Taveras be worried about? For one, Taveras is saying the he wouldn’t have passed the reforms if he’d known about the math errors.

But Buck accuses Taveras of signing off on the series of reforms after he was aware of the errors.

According to Buck, Taveras is using the actuarial mistakes as a campaign ploy to save face on a policy that took money out of the pockets of many voters.

Taveras and his challenger, Gina Raimondo, have been see-sawing back on forth in the polls since last year.

Screen shot 2014-08-13 at 10.48.29 AM — Credit: Wikipedia

Photo: “Angel Taveras headshot” by City of Providence, Office of the Mayor – City of Providence, Office of the Mayor. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

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