Comments about ‘Utah Retirement Systems should consider a conservative rate of return’

There aren't many companies with pensions these days.
What say we convert these government pensions to IRSs with one-time contributions from the government? That transfers the risk to the investor, not the taxpayer.
When public sector workers have a better deal than the people, they are (as Neal A Maxwell used to say) neither civil nor servants.

What do you mean tax payer risk? Retirement and taxes have no connection, they are escrow trust accounts that workers contribute to from weekly before/after taxed paychecks, so where ever taxes got involved is a big error.

With that established lets look at the real issue, the state has given these workers IOU's to steal money from escrow trust to use as part of the state budget. Now its become a tax payers issue, not a retirement issue with out funds. Utah has just run out of money in the retirement escrow & trust to borrow on IOU.

The rate of return is an issue but its a calculation problem with state and accountants not agreeing on how to calculate it. Are they basing returns on actual balance or balance plus the IOU's? Actual returns will be less than projected because IOU's don't collect interest.

You can play the numbers any way you want if you want to punish those who have put their trust in governmemt to be honest as keepers of the trust. By punish I mean reduce benefits by amount owed by Utah IOU debt on a sliding scale.

Completely ridiculous letter. Utah has the best managed retirement fund in the nation. Yet you get these guys that want to make it sound like their company can do it a lot better. Just give them 1% of your account each year and see what they can do!

These are the same predators that come to every teachers lounge in the state and try to get the teachers to convert their state run 401k accounts over to their company's account so they can profit from it.

Shame on them.

Now if we can just keep the legislature out of the retirement fund, things should be running smoothly.

To "My2Cents" it is a taxpayer risk because the employees have been promised certain benefits. No matter how much or how little is in the pension account, the retirees will be paid their pensions. So, if the pension accounts are unable to sustain the retirees, then the taxpayers have to pay the difference.

Thank you, RedShirt.