Report: Governments Mask Pension Debt, May Put Taxpayers At Risk

The Competitive Enterprise Institute's report, "Understanding Public Pension Debt" was featured by Nevada's Watchdog Wire:

A new report once again sheds light on public pension debt and its potential impact on states’ taxpayers and business climate.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) recently published a comprehensive study on state pensions, focused on the differences between the health of these plans using official figures and using “fair market value” calculations employed by private pensions and other government entities.

By some measures used in the CEI study, Nevada’s Public Employee Retirement System (NV PERS) rates in the middle of the pack among states, while in others the health of NV PERS appears to be among the direst.

A composite of the various studies CEI cites ranking states from worst to best has Nevada at 28th. However, in the study using the most recent data (2013), Nevada has the 10th-highest unfunded liability as a percentage of state GDP, 36.3%. Generally, among these studies the more recent the data used, the worse NV PERS looks.

Continue reading this article at WatchdogWire.com.