Keeping track of teacher pension disbursement to the living can be (here comes the pun) taxing for some retirement systems.
On one hand, there’s the UK teacher pension office, which in its undersophisticated hypervigilance to halt pension payments to deceased recipients actually halted disbursement four times to one retired teacher “because her pension provider repeatedly refuses to accept that she is not dead,” as the January 2024 Guardian reports:
Eileen McGrath, 85, was left without income over Christmas when Teachers’ Pensions, which administers payments on behalf of the UK government, wrongly matched her with a deceased stranger.
“In November I had received two letters from Teachers’ Pensions asking me euphemistically if I was dead,” she said. “I immediately called to make it clear that I was very much alive. Nevertheless, a week later two more letters arrived asking the same thing, so I wrote back to reiterate that I had still not died.”
Eileen McGrath
Four days before Christmas, McGrath discovered that her pension had not been paid. Despite a further call to Teachers’ Pensions the widow’s pension payment she also receives from the scheme was also stopped. (Schneider’s note to her American readers: a “scheme” is simply a plan or program.) Both payments were eventually made on 2 January after she complained.
McGrath said that she has been repeatedly asked to prove her existence since 2020 and faces losing her income each time. …
She had fallen victim to a vetting procedure that regularly checks pension beneficiaries against the death register to prevent ineligible payments. According to the Department for Education (DfE), which oversees Teachers’ Pensions, death register entries may be matched to scheme members even if personal details differ.
On the other hand, we have the New York Teachers Retirement System (TRS) in December 2023 suing to recover $120K, or two-years’ worth of payments, to the spouse of a deceased teacher, only to make bigger news two months later, in February 2024, as the same pension system was discovered trying to recover the hefty payout total of $781K that another spouse of a deceased teacher had bilked outof the pension system for 18 years.
It seems that New York TRS has no solid procedure in place to ensure that pension disbursement is actually happening for only living recipients, instead apparently choosing to assume that spouses of deceased teachers will unfailingly contact TRS about the death– an “honor system” assumption that cost TRS almost $1M in just these two cases.
Furthermore, TRS only found out about the 18-year scam because of “unidentified whistleblowers.” From the February 2024 New York Post:
A Queens widower pocketed more than $781,000 in pension payments meant for his dead schoolteacher wife for 18 years before city officials got wise to the theft, a probe found.
The eye-popping sum – which the heavily taxpayer-funded Teachers’ Retirement System, TRS, has been unable to recover – is perhaps the most egregious case of an individual collecting undeserved payments that the $100 billion pension fund has ever seen, experts said. …
When former teacher Lenora Burgess died in Queens in February 2002 at age 57, her husband Owen was responsible for notifying TRS of his wife’s death, the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools said in a newly released report. …
Lenora had elected the “maximum retirement allowance” option. That meant an annual pension of $42,419 a year – and no further payments to her heirs after her death.
But Owen Burgess, then 54 and living in Flushing, never told the agency of his wife’s demise.
So her pension checks kept coming in electronic payments of $3,535 a month for the next 221 months.
It was not until August 2020 that unidentified whistleblowers finally told TRS that the teacher had died 18 years before. …
When questioned by investigators, TRS officials described what amounts to an honor system for removing dead pensioners from its rolls.
“The responsibility to report a death to TRS lies with the pensioner’s family,” they told the SCI.
They also claimed to “periodically” run retiree names through outside databases, “but these databases did not always produce the names of all deceased members,” the report says.
Ex-pension chief Murphy called the excuses flimsy.
I seems that in both NY cases, the pension did not transfer to the spouses. However, even if the pension did transfer, the issue of potential erroneous payout beyond the life of a spouse still exists in the absence of reliable auditing of payment disbursement.
Apparently, a better auditing mechanism that the honor system or hapahzard combing of obits is needed. I asked St. Tammany (LA) Federation of Teachers president, Brant Osborn, about the mechanisms in place for accurately tracking of Louisiana teacher pension payments to living recipients, and he responded, “Hm. Good question.” He agreed to share my query with Teachers’ Retirement System of Louisiana (TRSL) board member, Mark Curry-Theriot. When I learn more, I will address the info in a subsequent post.
COMMENTER UPDATE:
I received the following from Louisiana Federation of Teachers (LFT) legislative director, Cynthia Posey:
Hi Mercedes-
Saw your post. TRSL gave a great explanation of the “death audit” during Joint Budget. Starts about 36 minutes in (actual time, 37:56) with Rep Amedee’s question (“This is a term I hadn’t seen before. What’s a ‘death audit’?”).
Under the rules of my Boston teacher’s pension, on retirement one must select an option: full benefits payable to the employee during their lifetime; or a diminished benefit payable during the employee’s lifetime with benefits continuing to a spouse after the employee’s death. The spouse must sign off on the election. (I worked with one man who wouldn’t retire because his spouse wanted a share of the pension!)
Every two years, we have to affirm by an affidavit we are still alive. One can appear live and in person, or submit a notarized copy of the affidavit. Seems likely the requirement was put in place to cut down on the shenanigans.
deutsch29: Mercedes Schneider's Blog 
Under the rules of my Boston teacher’s pension, on retirement one must select an option: full benefits payable to the employee during their lifetime; or a diminished benefit payable during the employee’s lifetime with benefits continuing to a spouse after the employee’s death. The spouse must sign off on the election. (I worked with one man who wouldn’t retire because his spouse wanted a share of the pension!)
Every two years, we have to affirm by an affidavit we are still alive. One can appear live and in person, or submit a notarized copy of the affidavit. Seems likely the requirement was put in place to cut down on the shenanigans.