Telling the public pension story with hard data.

• Author: Kellar, Elizabeth K.
• Position: Best Practices

What are the facts about pension funding? The Public Plans Database provides hard data for informed policy and decision making.

Public pensions have been a hot topic in the media and among state and local policymakers. News stories often depict pension funding in dire terms. But what are the facts? And how does the funded status of your government's pension plan compare with others? Now it's easy to find out with the Public Plans Database (PPD), a free, publicly accessible database of financial, actuarial, and other plan data for 150 of the nation's largest local and state public pension plans.

"Having hard data is the best way to talk about public policy and to make good policy decisions," observed Jeff Esser, executive director and chief executive officer of the Government Finance Officers Association and a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for State and Local Government Excellence. "Public Plans Database puts out the hard facts about public pensions and allows people to make their own judgements."

Esser likes the fact that the data used to populate PPD comes from the comprehensive annual financial reports for each plan, which are independently audited. "Finance directors and city managers can use PPD to make presentations and to respond to inquiries from their local legislative body, the state legislature, or the media with reliable, up-to-date information," he said.

With all of the inaccurate information in the media about public pension plans, Esser notes, it is important to have a resource with accurate data, making it possible to compare one pension plan to other plans, especially when it comes to making the full annually required contribution. "It demonstrates how other responsible systems are handing their pension funding around the country," he said.

WHAT IS THE PUBLIC PLANS DATABASE?

The PPD (at www.publicplansdata.org) was developed in 2007 as a partnership between the Center for State and Local Government Excellence and the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. It was recently expanded to include the National Association of State Retirement Administrators. The newly enhanced database contains plan-level data from 2001 to 2013 for 150 public pension plans, including 115 plans that are administered at the state level and 35 that are administered locally. PPD's sample covers 90 percent of state and local government public pension membership and assets nationwide.

The database is updated at least once a...