Cops who faced criminal charges. Others forced to resign because of repeated on-the-job misconduct. Still other officers who were demoted, suspended or ordered by the courts to forfeit their jobs after being accused of wrongdoing.
Despite violating the public trust, those cops were allowed to retire and collect their full pensions as though they did nothing wrong, a new investigation by the New Jersey Office of the State Comptroller found.
In a blistering report issued Wednesday, the watchdog agency took aim at state pension regulators, finding a “broken system” in which poor information sharing and haphazard oversight allowed law enforcement officers with “significant misconduct” to retire with little or no consequence to their pensions.
That’s despite a requirement that pensions be based on “honorable service,” with employees who abuse their positions supposed to risk losing some or all of their monthly retirement checks, the comptroller’s office said.
“These findings expose a serious gap in efforts to protect underfunded pension funds and deter misconduct by law enforcement officers,” Acting State Comptroller Kevin Walsh said in a statement. “Our laws demand that public employees act honorably as a condition of receiving their pensions.”
The report sampled nearly 60 members of the Police and Firemen’s Retirement System who were collecting pensions despite records of misconduct. Of those, 21 had slipped through the cracks and never faced hearings to determine whether they should be fully or partly stripped of their benefits, the report said.
That included one officer who faced, and was later convicted of, child pornography charges, the report said. In some instances, the officers received their pensions for years without the board uncovering the allegations against them, the report said.
And Walsh said the 21 officers were likely just the tip of the iceberg, representing only those that his office was able to identify through news reports and other public disclosures.
“We don’t know how many are out there who committed misconduct and are getting full pensions simply because no one told the pension board what they did wrong,” Walsh said.
In response, the state Division of Pensions and Benefits said it was reviewing the findings to assess whether improvements are needed. In a statement, spokeswoman Danielle Currie said protecting the integrity of system is “at the core of DPB’s mission,” and that the division is committed to ensuring that pensions go only to those who have earned them.
Gregory Petzold, the executive director of the Police and Firemen’s system, and James Kompany, the board’s chairman, did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
The comptroller blamed both bureaucratic shortfalls and overt efforts to evade the rules, and called for a host of reforms to better protect taxpayers.
In many cases, the Police and Firemen’s Retirement System was simply unaware of the misconduct because of confusion by local officials of what they were required to disclose, the report said.
In other instances, settlement agreements between towns and their officers appeared designed to hide the misconduct from public scrutiny. One agreement cited “attorney-client privilege” to try to improperly keep the allegations hidden, the report said. Others contained problematic non-disclosure or confidentiality clauses.
The report marks just the latest criticism of New Jersey’s pension process, given pension boards that are often reluctant to strip employees of their retirements benefits. Still, pension trustees have long insisted the system works as intended, with those who commit misconduct punished, but within bounds.
New Jersey law carves out 23 specific on-the-job crimes under which employees’ pensions are automatically forfeited. But for retirees whose misconduct falls outside of that, boards weigh the allegations against the good they did throughout their careers, then determine whether their pensions should be reduced or eliminated.
The report did not identify the 21 officers or the departments in which they worked, and only briefly summarized the misconduct for which they were accused. But it cast the allegations against them as “very serious,” and said it included five officers who faced criminal charges and others who were suspended or forced to resign because of wrongdoing.
The report accused trustees of the Police and Firemen’s system of going out of their way to protect retirees accused of misconduct, charging they frequently escape with little or no reduction of their monthly payments.
Of the 21 officers, most have since received hearings to determine whether their pensions should be forfeited, the report said. Yet even then, just three saw their pensions partly reduced, the report said.
The report cast the financial impact as significant, given the lifetime of payments that a pension guarantees. Officers receiving more money than they should can easily cost the state hundreds of thousands of dollars over the many years they collect benefits, investigators estimated.
Efforts in the state Legislature to tighten pension rules have come up short before.
In 2022, the state Assembly approved a bill to make it harder for employees convicted of crimes to collect their pensions, following an investigation by NJ Advance Media. But the proposal stalled in the Senate and never became law.
