Police officers who have faced criminal charges. Others were forced to resign because of repeated workplace misconduct. Still other officers have been demoted, suspended or ordered by courts to lose their jobs after being accused of wrongdoing.
Despite the breach of public trust, those police officers were allowed to retire and collect their full pensions as if they had done nothing wrong, a new investigation by the New Jersey Office of the State Comptroller has found.
In a scathing report issued Wednesday, the watchdog went after state pension regulators, finding a “broken system” in which poor information sharing and haphazard oversight allowed law enforcement officers with “significant misconduct” to retire with little or no consequence to their pensions.
That’s despite the requirement that pensions be based on “honorable service,” employees who abuse their positions should risk losing some or all of their monthly retirement checks, the comptroller’s office said.
“These findings expose a serious gap in efforts to protect underfunded pension funds and deter misconduct by law enforcement officials,” Acting State Comptroller Kevin Walsh said in a statement. “Our laws require public employees to act honorably as a condition of receiving their pension.”
The report sampled nearly 60 members of the police and fire pension system who were collecting pensions despite records of wrongdoing. Of those, 21 slipped through the cracks and never faced hearings to determine whether they should be stripped of all or part of their benefits, the report said.
This included an officer who was confronted and later convicted of child pornography charges, the report said. In some cases, officers received their pensions for years without the board discovering the allegations against them, the report said.
And Walsh said the 21 officers were likely just the tip of the iceberg, representing only those his office was able to identify through news reports and other public disclosures.
“We don’t know how many are out there who have committed misconduct and are getting full pensions simply because nobody told the pension board what they did wrong,” Walsh said.
Acting State Comptroller Kevin Walsh
In response, the state Division of Pensions and Benefits said it is reviewing the findings to assess whether improvements are needed. In a statement, spokeswoman Danielle Currie said protecting the integrity of the system is “at the heart of the DPB’s mission” and that the division is committed to ensuring pensions are only provided to those who have earned them.
Gregory Petzold, chief executive of the police and fire system, and James Kompany, chairman of the board, did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
The comptroller blamed both red tape and overt efforts to circumvent the rules and called for a series of reforms to better protect taxpayers.
In many cases, the police and fire retirement systems were simply unaware of the misconduct because of confusion on the part of local officials about what they were supposed to disclose, the report said.
In other cases, settlement agreements between cities and their officers appeared designed to hide wrongdoing from public scrutiny. One settlement cited “attorney-client privilege” to try to improperly keep the allegations under wraps, the report said. Others contained problematic non-disclosure or confidentiality clauses.
The report marks just the latest criticism of New Jersey’s pension process, with pension boards often reluctant to withdraw their employees’ retirement benefits. However, pension administrators have long insisted that the system is working as intended, with wrongdoers being punished but within limits.
New Jersey law sets forth 23 specific workplace offenses under which employee pensions are automatically forfeited. But for retirees whose misconduct falls outside of this, boards weigh the allegations against the good they’ve done over their careers, then determine whether their pensions should be reduced or eliminated.
The report did not identify the 21 officers or the departments in which they worked and only briefly summarized the wrongdoing they were accused of. But he described the allegations against them as “very serious” and said they included five officers who faced criminal charges and others who were suspended or forced to resign over wrongdoing.
The report accused police and fire system administrators of going out of their way to protect retirees accused of wrongdoing, alleging that they frequently get away with little or no reduction in their monthly payments.
Of the 21 officers, most have since received hearings to determine whether their pensions should be withheld, the report said. However, even then, only three saw their pensions partially cut, the report said.
The report considers the financial impact to be significant given the lifetime of payments that a pension guarantees. Officers who receive more money than they should easily cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars over the many years they collect benefits, investigators estimated.
Efforts in the state Legislature to tighten pension rules emerged shortly before.
In 2022, the state Assembly approved a bill to make it harder for employees convicted of felonies to collect their pensions, according to an investigation by NJ Advance Media. But the proposal stalled in the Senate and never became law.
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