Last month, the Chicago Tribune broke the story of a union leader who was re-hired for one day at the City of Chicago and then retired with a $158,000 city pension. Yesterday, the Tribune broke the story of the union leader accruing three pensions off of the same work credit: a city pension, a local union pension and a national union pension. Combined, his annual pension income exceeds $400,000- with anticipated lifetime benefit of $9 million.
There is debate as to whether these rotten scams could even be legal in Illinois! But, we’ve discovered that sweetheart union leader access into our Illinois state pension system is an even larger scam.
On September 29th, we broke this story nationally on the third largest conservative talk radio program: 34 union leaders who are not government employees are draining nearly $340 thousand per month from the state teachers’ pension system.
Last Sunday, the Illinois Statehouse News was the first Illinois newspaper to investigate. No other newspaper has covered the statewide angle.
Former employees of the National Education Association (NEA), Illinois Education Association (IEA), Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT), and Illinois Association of School Boards (IASB), drawing pensions have collected more than $47 million from the Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS), to date.
It’s an on-going $47 million pension scam. Union leaders who are not government employees are draining millions in teacher retirement pensions.
How did we unearth this pension abuse?
On September 13th, our organization For The Good of Illinois launched www.openthebooks.com. We posted the pay and pensions of virtually every public employee from every level of Illinois government. 7 million lines of data and a grand sum of a quarter trillion dollars of government spending are posted online.
At openthebooks.com, citizens are uncovering sweetheart insider deals given to organizations that are not government entities. With their lobbying power, unions and non-profit organizations exert so much muscle in Springfield that they’ve literally written themselves into the government’s pension code.
Consider these examples:
The second highest teacher pension in history goes to the former President of the NEA (national teachers union, Washington, DC)- $20,200 per month. Additionally, we identified thirty-three union leaders draining $318 thousand a month from the teacher pension system. Read more here.
Newspapers identify the example of Kenneth Drum. Drum has a state teachers’ retirement of more than $160,000 a year. Drum only worked for 12 years as a teacher. Drum’s large pension comes not from his time in the classroom, but rather because of a 20-year career at Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT). He’s collected more than $2 million in retirement.
Three of the top six largest pensions in municipal retirement history are paid to retirees from non-profit, non-government organizations: Park District Risk Management Association ($20,125 per month), Illinois Association of Park Districts ($18,436 per month), Illinois Municipal League ($15,076). All organizations participated in end of career salary spiking to maximize the government pensions. See this at openthebooks.com and choose RETIRED; VILLAGE, TOWNSHIP, COUNTY, LOCAL.
The Chicago Tribune outed union leader Dennis Gannon who was re-hired for one day at the City of Chicago and then retired with a $158,000 city pension. See this at openthebooks.com and choose RETIRED, CITY OF CHICAGO. Gannon has the #1 city pension between the years 2000-2010. He’s already drained a million dollars of city pension.
The greed of union leadership and other insiders is draining government pension funds. Unearthing these insider scams helps to protect the hard working rank-and-file government employees and taxpayers. Since the sustainability of Illinois’ pension systems is in question, public employees and taxpayers deserve hard facts and estimates of our liability.
Stop the insider pension abuse. End the “pension invention” of sweetheart union access to government retirement systems.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.