Unanimous pension accounting changes don't satisfy economists

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board, based in Norwalk, Conn., unanimously approved two sets of rule changes, one for pension plans themselves and another for the government employers that sponsor the plans.

According to GASB, the new requirements for pension accounting will make financial statements more useful, enhance their "value for assessing accountability and interperiod equity" and increase "consistency and transparency."

Government pensions have been the source of recent political disputes and a wide range of states and cities have embraced reform, including Rhode Island, Utah, Wisconsin and the California cities of San Diego and San Jose.

GASB defines generally accepted accounting principles for governments in the U.S. other than the federal government, much like its sister organization, the Financial Accounting Standards Board, defines GAAP accounting for the private sector.

Both FASB and GASB are part of the Financial Accounting Foundation.

Currently, governments disclose unfunded pension obligations in footnotes to their financial reports. Under the new rules, these debts will be listed alongside money owed to bondholders and other liabilities.

"They'll be reported out in the open instead of being buried in the notes," said Eileen Norcross, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center who has written extensively about pensions. "That brings about more discipline."

"It's not a funding rule," Norcross said. "It's a reporting rule."

The new rules also:

• Limit the range of actuarial methods and assumptions available to governments.
• Standardize the time periods over which governments can spread out changes in liabilities and assets.
• Mandate accounting for ad hoc cost-of-living increases if they are essentially automatic.
• Change the way governments discount their liabilities and increase disclosures related to the discount rate.

The new rules will go into effect for pension plans in fiscal years beginning June 15, 2013, a year ahead of implementation for governments themselves, which starts with fiscal years beginning June 15, 2014.

The first reports under the new rules will be issued a year later in 2014 for plans and 2015 for government sponsors.

Under the new rules, actuaries must use a specific method to calculate pension benefits (entry age, level percentage of payroll) at least every two years.

According to the new standard, actuaries could previously choose "among six methods with additional variations."

Under the new rules, costs or savings attributed to changes in benefits will be recognized immediately. Costs or savings from differences between expectations and actual experience will be recognized over the number of years before the average employee retires.

That calculation will include retired employees as having no time before retirement.

The effects of changes in assumptions will be spread over the same time period.

Differences between expected investment returns and actual returns will be spread over a five-year period, a practice known as asset smoothing.

Norcross said GASB's embrace of smoothing is disappointing.

"Over time you don't gain anything" from the practice, she said.

GASB will also require governments that consistently provide cost-of-living increases to retired employees to include future increases in the valuation of their pension costs.

Governments will also have to disclose their assumptions, explain the causes of changes in net pension liability, show how much of their pension liability is covered by pension assets and report how close their actual contributions come to the actuarially-defined contribution,

"I think I see some technical improvements as they put on the final touches," said Jeremy Gold, an actuary with a doctorate in finance who has been critical of government pension accounting. "All in all, however, I think they continue to miss the mark in a big way."

Gold said it will be unclear under the new rules how much of pension costs for work done yesterday will be "foisted upon future taxpayers."

"Interestingly, in the 1980's, many plans were overfunding, overcharging taxpayers of that period for the benefit of those who came later," Gold said.

GASB stated increased interperiod equity - or the assignment of changes in pension finances to the proper reporting period - as one of its goals for the new rules.

Gold said it will still be difficult to compare pension plans and taxpayers will still have difficulty determining the value of benefits earned in any given year.

"In other words, what are we taxpayers paying in total compensation to those employees who are providing us with public services today," he said. "How do such total compensation packages compare to those in the private sector?"

"This is too little, too late," said Frank Keegan, editor at State Budget Solutions. "The new regulations leave too many loopholes and can just provide another level of deception."

"In fact, these new guidelines will actually encourage the worst public pension plans to take more risk at a time when they should be reducing risk," Keegan said. "That just sets dedicated municipal and state workers and taxpayers up for a bigger crash in the next market downturn."

He said government pensions "are in the hole for at least $4.4 trillion and the hole is getting deeper every minute," citing an April 2012 report by the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard's Kennedy School.

"GASB members should ask themselves whether they are part of the solution or part of the problem," Keegan said.

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Read the rest of the article, including the economic criticism of GASB's discount rate policies, here.