Pension Transparency: Alaska
Pensions Policy
Analysis of Alaska's policies
Teachers, policymakers and taxpayers deserve accurate and reliable information about the costs and benefits of the public pension systems they support.
Just as teachers can easily obtain their salary schedules, they should have access to information about pensions so that they can make informed decisions about their career and retirement futures. Teachers in Alaska enroll in a defined contribution plan and receive statements about their retirement accounts and market earnings. The account balance is determined in part by market performance and already reflects the value of their contributions and the employer's contributions that are deposited in the account. Thus, the indicators in this goal related to providing information to teachers are not applicable.
Public disclosures on teacher pensions in Alaska are more transparent than most states. Alaska reports projections for future contributions required to fully amortize the system's total unfunded liabilities, and it also reports these projections under a range of assumptions about the rate of return on investments, not just under the system's own assumption. This allows stakeholders in Alaska to appropriately assign risk to the system's obligations and provide clarity about potential unfunded liabilities facing taxpayers.
The Government Accountability Standards Board (GASB) requires public retirement systems to disclose who makes employer contributions, and the proportion of total contributions for which each contributor is responsible. Although all states' pension systems collect this information, Alaska does not make these data readily available.
Alaska, like most states, reports the portion of total pension contributions that is normal cost and the proportion that is amortization cost. However, the state does not report information about whether it has taken on debt in order to pay for current or future retiree benefits (e.g. through pension obligation bonds or other instruments for raising capital). Even if the state has not taken on debt, it should disclose this information to the public as it is an important indicator of the state's overall health and stability.
Recommendations for Alaska
Report to policymakers and the public data that give a complete representation of the system's financial health.
GASB requires systems to disclose who makes the employer contributions, and Alaska should make this report available on its web site. Alaska should also disclose in its reports whether or not the system has taken debt service to pay for retirement benefits.
State response to our analysis
Updated: December 2017
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Alaska
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Research rationale
In order for a state to have pension transparency, it is critical that the state discloses all financial and other data necessary for policymakers, school districts, and taxpayers (including teachers) to have a clear and accurate depiction of the current standing and future health of the system. For teachers, the recipients of pension benefits, there should be clarity on the future of their own retirement benefits.
All pension systems provide some basic public reporting, including annual financial statements, known as the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), and actuarial valuation reports.[1] Yet the information in these reports rarely provides more than minimal insight into the systems' financial health. Similarly, most systems make some basic information available to teachers through member statements and web-based resources. But teachers need more detailed information to help them to really understand their own prospective benefits and to enable informed decisions about their career and retirement futures.
Many states provide online benefits calculators, which, as the name suggests, calculate information about benefits based on parameters entered by the user. While these tools are helpful and important, they are not nearly sufficient. Teachers have to know that the tools exist, understand what they do, and be motivated to use them. The calculators also provide rough estimates of very high-level information. Teachers need more information that is presented in a clear way and delivered to them, whether they ask for it or not.
It is vital that states report to individual teachers the amount contributed by them and the amount contributed by their employer. States could also achieve this by reporting how much might be earned if teachers were to put contributions into a personal retirement savings account. It is recommended that states provide consistent data on how teachers' pension wealth accrues at one or a few points in time over the course of teachers' careers. States should also provide data on the lifetime value of benefits accrued at a given service year for all or most years of future service. Such reporting would allow teachers to understand what they put in to their retirement nest eggs and compare that to what they might expect to get out in future benefits. This information would also help teachers plan for timing their retirements in a way that best suits their personal circumstances. In general though, teachers across the country are provided with little or no information about how their benefits accrue over time, leaving them poorly positioned to make decisions that are in their own best interests.
Efforts to increase transparency are hampered by some common practices, including that rates of return assumed by most states are often way too high. What's even more staggering than the estimated $516 billion in accrued teacher pension liabilities nationwide is that this debt estimate is likely wildly optimistic, based on unrealistic rates of returns on investments for the pension system, as well as exceedingly long balance payoff dates (amortization periods).[2]
Funding pension benefits requires the use of projections, or actuarial assumptions, about the future. Demographic assumptions are expectations about a pension plan's membership, such as changes in the teaching workforce or the number of retired plan participants, when participants will retire, and how long they will live after they retire. Pension systems also make economic assumptions about factors such as the rate of wage growth and the expected investment return on the funds.
System officials know well that much of the current pension math is optimistic, at best. But assuming a return rate closer to reality would make the vast majority of the nation's pension systems less than 50 percent funded and would force states to come up with even more money to cover today's pension costs.[3]
States use accounting practices that obscure the depth of the pension crisis. The paying down of a defined benefit retirement plan's unfunded liability over a reasonable period of time (amortization period) can be structured in many ways. The expected years to fully fund pension systems hide the fact that states have a number of ways to pay off their pension debts. Like a homeowner paying a mortgage, states can make regular-level payments using defined payment schedules called closed amortization periods.[4] On the other hand, states can effectively refinance their pension debt annually (open amortization), resetting the amortization target date indefinitely. These and other, more complicated accounting procedures are not commonly understood.
Rather than using practices that obscure the health of their pension systems, states have a responsibility to provide teachers with accurate, thorough, and easy-to-comprehend information so that they can understand their own retirement benefits.
[1] Doherty, K. M., Jacobs, S., & Leuken, M. F. (2017, February). Lifting the Pension Fog. National Council on Teacher Quality, EducationCounsel. Retrieved from https://www.nctq.org/dmsView/Lifting_the_Pension_Fog
[2] Doherty, K. M., Jacobs, S., & Leuken, M. F. (2017, February). Lifting the Pension Fog. National Council on Teacher Quality, EducationCounsel. Retrieved from https://www.nctq.org/dmsView/Lifting_the_Pension_Fog; For an overview of the current state of teacher pensions, the various incentives they create, and suggested solutions, see Costrell, R. M., & Podgursky, M. (2011, February). Reforming k-12 educator pensions: A labor market perspective. New York, NY: TIAA-CREF Institute. Retrieved from https://www.tiaainstitute.org/public/institute/research/briefs/institute_pb_reforming_K-12_educator_pensions.html
[3] For additional information on state pension systems, see Loeb, S. & Miller, L. (2006). State teacher policies: What are they, what are their effects, and what are their implications for school finance? Stanford University: Institute for Research on Education Policy and Practice. Retrieved from http://web.stanford.edu/~sloeb/papers/Loeb_Miller.pdf; and: Hansen, J. (2008, May). Teacher pensions: A background paper. Committee for Economic Development. Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED502293
[4] Doherty, K. M., Jacobs, S., & Leuken, M. F. (2017, February). Lifting the Pension Fog. National Council on Teacher Quality, EducationCounsel. Retrieved from https://www.nctq.org/dmsView/Lifting_the_Pension_Fog