By Matt Rooney | The Save Jersey Blog
It’s about time, Save Jerseyans…
Governor Chris Christie today announced the creation of a “Pension Fraud and Abuse Unit” to function as a division of the state Treasury Department. Created by executive order, the Unit’s primary role will be to find fraud and enable legal action when it’s warranted.
Former Internal Revenue Service criminal investigator Jim Scott will leave the AG’s office to head the unit.
“We’ve taken historic, bipartisan action to fix a broken public pension system that would have been insolvent in a matter of years without bold intervention,” said Governor Christie. “This is a serious and significant new step to protect the integrity of the system and guard every taxpayer dollar and employee contribution from fraud and abuse. Siphoning of pension and disability benefits by fraud or ineligibility hurts everyone, including honest current and future pensioners and, above all, New Jersey taxpayers who support the system and expect it to be fair and free of fraud.”
Click here to read the executive order.
Pension abuse – both legal and not-so-legal – continues to plague the Garden State. CNBC recently profiled New Jersey’s public pension system as one of the nation’s most-underfunded. A recent study found that millions in benefits had been paid to ineligible New Jersey prisoners.
“It was just a few months ago that a state comptroller’s report revealed that inmates were illegally collecting millions in state pension checks as well as other public benefits,” said Sen. Tom Kean, Jr. “This new team will not only provide the necessary oversight to identify fraud, but will hold accountable individuals who attempt to cheat the system.”
Visit our archives to keep yourselves in the loop, Save Jerseyans. It’s your money… take an interest in how it’s spent!
YAY! Get rid of the double dippers!!!
and our Lt. Guv enabler ? more bushwa!
What we need is a donut abuse unit.
Look: the best pension abuse remedy would be to shrink government, thereby reducing the number of public workers drawing pensions! But we´ll take what we can get with a Democrat legislature, right?
He´s about a day late and $5.5 billion short
Go fat man !