Retired teachers overpaid by as much as $3 million

April 30, 2011

3 million dollars. that's the amount the state educational retirement board estimates it overpaid to hundreds of retired public school and university employees last summer. stuart dyson tells us what the state plans to do abouit. last summer the state changed the way it calculates interest for retired teachers and other education employees - but what the retirement board calls a computer glitch resulted in 766 refunds that were way out of line - mostly overpayments it looks like - with a few people getting shortchanged. one retiree got a check for more than a quarter of a million dollars - a gross overpayment if there ever was one - the audit should reveal all of the problem payments that went out last july and august. " it's gonna take em about a week or so before they get through all of these - so we'll have some idea where we are - but from my understanding it could be a total of about 3 million dollars." " we're concerned about our members knowing that we take this very seriously and that our intent is to correct this as quickly as we can." retirement board members have questions about why their own internal audit didn't catch the overpayments right away. while 3 million dollars certainly is a serious pile of money -- consider this -- the erb pays out about 49 million dollars a month to its retirees. and the investment fund it draws on is about 8 and a half billion dollars.