CalPERS new computer system is continuing to miscalculate some pension deductions, despite a modification that fund officials said had fixed the problem.
The issue came up Tuesday afternoon during a report to the fund's Pension and Health Benefits Committee by Donna Lum, Deputy Executive Officer for Customer Services and Support. Tuesday's Bee highlights some of the report, which you can read here.
CalPERS spokesman Brad Pacheco is checking on how many members are affected.
We've embedded a real-time transcript (which may not be an error-free verbatim record of the proceedings) at the end of this post and highlighted the exchange between Lum and board member J.J. Jelincic about the "unfixed" pension deduction problem:
J.J. JELINCIC: I am beginning to hear reports that some of the things that we had problems with,we fixed, have somehow started to become unfixed. And I'm wondering if you can identify some of those areas and how do we catch them more quickly?
Ms. Lum: So one of the areas that I am aware where we have made modifications, we've amended members' accounts to address issues such as deductions, where we have erred either in taking too much of a deduction either for health or dental. We have seen some of these cases come back and reoccur after the modification and the correction is made.
This is an area of high priority that the project team is working on. Accenture is looking to identify what is the root cause of these errors that are reoccurring. We have a dedicated SWAT team specifically in the area of health deduction issues. This team is looking at the cases, identifying again attempting to identify the root cause of these errors.Outside of those, I am not familiar with any other type of processing errors, or processing change or system change that we've applied to the system that is taking us a step backwards in our processing.
Transcript of CalPERS board discussion about computer system
PHOTO: J.J. Jelincic / Hector Amezcua, Sacramento Bee 2011
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