Hundreds of Columbia pension payments delayed
A combination of technical and human error led to the delay of hundreds of pension payments for former police and firefighters.
City staff confirmed to ABC 17 News that the monthly payments made at the end of each month did not happen on schedule. This affected all 374 former employees that receive the automatic deposit.
Community Outreach director Steve Sapp said the city’s Treasury division sends the money to U.S. Bank about five days before the end of the month. That bank then deposits each person’s pension automatically. This time, Sapp said, the city’s payment did not go through due to a technical “glitch.” While it appeared the payments went through, a more thorough check would have shown otherwise, Sapp said.
“It looked like the file had been transferred, the belief was that it had,” Sapp told ABC 17 News. “It had not.”
When the city began receiving questions, they realized the error, and resent the files to U.S. Bank for disbursement. Sapp, who receives a pension himself for 23 years working at the fire department, said city staff would “double and triple check” that payments go through from now on, claiming it’s the first time the city has had this type of problem with pension payments.
Columbia pays police and firefighters that work 20 years or more a pension upon retirement, and pays it for the rest of their life. The timeframe was just recently changed to 25 years, but personnel who started before the change are “grandfathered” in with the 20-year limit.
The police and fire pensions came under the state auditor’s scrutiny in 2014, highlighted as “problematic” due to the lagging debt payments the city made on it. Since then, the city has increased its payments to the pension fund. Sapp said Wednesday’s issue was not an issue of whether the city could pay the pensions, but an error he hoped wouldn’t happen again.
“These are earned benefits for those police and fire pension holders, and we want to make sure that the promises that were made to them are kept,” Sapp said.
