by Rory Hall, Daily Coin:

We have reported on CALPers, Illinois and the Teamsters Pension funds being nothing more than a shell with little more than I.O.U.’s in the vaults. This is to say nothing of what happened in Detroit when that city filled bankruptcy or Dallas Pension Fund. Bankers are making out like the bandits they are, and your pension fund, yes yours, is possibly bankrupt. Believe what you will, but if you are counting on a state or city pension fund you may want to consider thinking about making other arrangements. This is not financial advice, as we do not offer financial advice. It might make sense to someone that is concerned about their future to think about what all these ringing alarm bells mean to you.

The steam that is building began in earnest in 2012 and has been picking up speed ever since. Look no further than some of the recent events we have documented time and again – Detroit, CALPers, Jeremy Stein, Teamsters and Dallas Pension Fund. All of these events have taken place in less than five years. What will the next four-plus years bring? How much longer should one sit on their hands and watch as thousands upon thousands of people either have retirement stolen or placed on lock-down as is the case with the Dallas Police Pension fund?

The latest ponzi scheme to be identified and exposed was reported by Florida Watchdog.

Florida lawmakers are using an accounting tweak to defer payments on $20 billion in pension debt, a maneuver that not only hides the “true cost of government” from voters but “passes this expense on to future taxpayers,” Truth in Accounting (TIA) CEO and Founder Sheila Weinberg said.

Speaking with Watchdog.org in advance of Tuesday’s release of TIA’s annual ‘Financial State of the States’ report, Weinberg said if the state’s unfunded pension liability was included in its financial statement, Florida would have $58.6 billion available in assets to pay $70.1 billion worth of bills – an $11.6 billion shortfall.

Every Florida taxpayer, she said, has a $1,800 share – and counting – in this unfunded pension debt.

TIA, a Chicago-based nonprofit dedicated to government fiscal transparency, analyzed and graded all 50 state governments’ fiscal health based on their latest Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFRs) filings.

Across all 50 states, TIA calculated more than $1.5 trillion of unfunded debt, “a huge financial burden for current and future taxpayers,” much of it related to public employee health care and retiree benefits.

Florida, once again, scored in the lowest dozen states, earning a ‘C’ in TIA’s report because, like many states, it defers paying down pension debts year after year while only budgeting the bare minimum annually to fund the plan.

Of the $60.8 billion in retirement benefits promised to nearly 400,000 former public workers enrolled in the Florida Retirement System (FRS),  TIA maintains in its report that the state has not funded $10.9 billion in pension and $9.3 billion in retiree health care benefits.

“The state has put no money aside to pay for those promises. Future taxpayers will have to pay for them,” Weinberg said.

Because the state “doesn’t want to fess up” about its unfunded pension debt, she said Florida’s reported net position is “inflated” by $4.3 billion.

“It’s showing $4.3 billion less in the red than if they had incurred that cost” of paying down the pension debt, Weinberg said. Source

We have studied, researched and written about this for well over four years. Harry Markopolous, in 2011, tried to warn us about the ongoing theft, within the pension funds, on a daily basis by the banking cabal – link. CALPers pension program is north of 50% underfunded and losing a little more each and every quarter. – link. These are merely two of the articles that paint a picture of a tsunami of pension bankruptcies in the near future.

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