Gov. Phil Murphy said Friday he is open to tightening New Jersey’s pension law, following an investigation by NJ Advance Media that found nearly 100 former government employees in the state are collecting pensions despite job-related criminal convictions.
“You look at that and you say, ‘Come on, man,’” Murphy said after an unrelated event in South Amboy when asked about the report. “I’ve already said to my team we need to look at this. We need to revisit this. We need to do it with the Legislature, obviously.”
The review published online Wednesday on NJ.com detailed how New Jersey’s public pension system has allowed at least 95 former state, county and local employees to collect monthly retirement checks despite crimes spanning the gamut of misconduct: teachers who molested students, politicians who accepted bribes and police and corrections officers who assaulted people in their custody or stole by submitting fake overtime slips.
Over the past 15 years, the state Legislature has sought to crack down, enacting a list of 23 specific on-the-job crimes under which employees forfeit their pensions. Yet the media company’s investigation found that pension-friendly plea bargaining and wrinkles in the law have saved the checks of others with egregious offenses, who often see their pensions reduced but not eliminated.
Trenton last revisited the rules in 2019, when the Statehouse added several sex offenses to the mandatory forfeiture statute in the wake of the MeToo movement.
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