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City Comptroller Brad Lander has called for a state probe into the Board
of Education Retirement System (BERS) after the pension fund’s deputy
director allegedly lied to get a hefty raise.

Lander penned a letter to state Department of Financial Services
Superintendent Adrienne A. Harris, requesting her agency review BERS over
what he calls its “broad dereliction of its duties.”

Daniel Miller, deputy executive director of BERS, received a $28,549 pay
hike to $255,000 in 2018 after asking his boss to match the salary he
claimed an Ohio pension system had offered him, the DOE pension fund’s Inspector General Anastasia Coleman found in an Aug. 9 report provided to
The Post.

Miller applied for the job but never received an offer from the Ohio
School Employees Retirement System – and continued to lie about it, even
to investigators, Coleman claimed.

BERS executive director Sanford Rich granted Miller the raise without
verifying the nonexistent job offer – and without consulting the board, investigators said. Rich then used Miller’s raise to plead for a bigger paycheck for himself.

Miller, 41, now collects $262,650 a year. Rich, 64, pockets $235,599. The
pair are among the highest paid public employees in all of New York City.
For comparison Mayor Eric Adams’ salary is $258,750.

Following the release of the report, Lander called on the city pension
board to fire Rich and demote Miller, but trustees defeated the push by
vote in October.

“The board’s failure to hold them accountable for their breaches of public trust has placed me in a difficult position as the City’s chief fiscal officer,” Lander wrote in his letter to Harris.

Funded largely with taxpayer contributions, BERS is the smallest of the
city’s five retirement systems, covering over 57,000 central DOE staffers, school aides, cafeteria workers, and nurses, among others.

However, Lander noted that its budget is the third largest out of the five systems, with a 2023 budget of $34,657,458.

“The BERS Board has not exercised meaningful oversight of the budget,
allowing the same staff who breached the public trust in relationship to
their own salaries untrammeled control over a rapidly expanding budget,”
Lander said.

Lander also claimed that BERS provides staff with minimal information
about decisions regarding its $8 billion investment and that decisions are
made with “little oversight and safeguards.”

“These failures by the BERS Board add up to a broad dereliction of its
duties, and they have led to my loss of confidence in the ability of the
board of trustees of BERS to provide fiduciary oversight to the system,”
Lander wrote.

“It is with a heavy heart that I raise these concerns. While I have begun
a formal audit of the BERS through my capacity as the Comptroller of the
City of New York, I feel obligated to raise these issues to the Department
of Financial Services for a broader review.”

<https://nypost.com/2023/02/09/nyc-comptroller-brad-lander-calls-for- state-to-probe-pension-fund-over-broad-dereliction-of-its-duties/>

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