Federal employees’ Thrift Savings Plan accounts could end up collateral damage in the push to hike federal employees’ pension contributions, the American Federation of Government Employees said yesterday.
At Monday’s meeting with the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, AFGE public policy director Jacque Simon asked for more granular, grade-by-grade data on TSP contribution rates. Simon said she wants to know whether lower-paid federal employees are pulling back on their TSP contributions in response to proposals to increase pension contributions by anywhere from 1.2 percent to 5 percent.
“It’s going to be increasingly important to have access to data like that,” Simon said. “We have good reason to believe that TSP participation by people in lower grades is going to decline as people are forced to pay more for their FERS annuity. […] It’s crucial we get that [information]not next year, but today.”
The board said it didn’t have data that could be broken down in that way, since it only tracks the dollar amount of employees’ contributions — not percentages of their overall salaries. But the board said it could get limited information on contribution rates for automatically-enrolled feds, although those participants make up a miniscule portion of the overall TSP population. Simon said that would be better than nothing.
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Might want to check (may require a FOIA request) to find out how the government repaid the Civil Service Retiremetn Fund and the TSP G Fund as they drained them dry during the debt ceiling crisis from May-July 2011. If they repaid the debt using IOUs, it would explain why they want to cut benefits and raise contributions – to turn it into Social Security, where they rely on the current workers to pay for the retiree’s benefits, hiding the effective theft of $500 billion of federal employee’s monies.
Imagine if everyone transferred their G funds to a stock fund out of easy government access. What happens when there is nothing left in the G fund but bad IOUs? The law doesn’t not allow them to bookmark transfers to the C fund (actually only allows for book keeping G Fund interest while the government is borrowing it). Might cause a crisis in confidence of the TSP.