Exclusive: Study shows $1.2 trillion gap for public pensions

A pair of elderly couples view the ocean and waves along the beach in La Jolla, California March 8, 2012.

(Reuters) - The largest 100 public pension funds have around $1.2 trillion of unfunded liabilities, about $300 billion above the nearly $900 billion they reported themselves, according to a new actuarial study to be released on Monday.

The pension systems reported a median funding level of 75.1 percent. The study by the actuarial firm Milliman, which used different ways to value assets and measure liabilities, finds an aggregate level of funding of 67.8 percent.

But Milliman, one of the world largest actuarial firms took a close look at U.S. public pension funding for the first time, and said the multibillion-dollar difference was good news.

Rebecca Sielman, the report's author, said results should reassure the public that America's public pensions in general are accurately reporting their funding shortfalls.

The difference between what public pensions across the United States have reported and what Milliman found wasn't significant, Sielman said. She noted that a relatively small change in the way the figures are calculated could lead to seemingly outsized results because the funds are so large.

"The numbers really didn't change that much," she said. "It really didn't move the needle."

Both the pension funds' reported results and Milliman's findings fell within the range of previous estimates from other studies of the total size of the public pension shortfall in the United States.

With the study, Milliman, stepped into the debate about whether public pensions are underreporting the size of their liabilities.

That hot-button issue revolves around how much money public employers - and, by extension, taxpayers - will have to contribute to cover future payouts for member benefits. It is a key issue at a time of dwindling revenues and tighter budgets for states and local governments.

Pension funds get money from the returns on their assets and from members' contributions. States and cities also pay into the funds, but their contributions are discounted based on how much money they think their investments will make over time.

The 100 funds Milliman studied used a median rate of return for their investments of 8 percent. But the recession slashed into the market, dropping actual median returns to just 3.2 percent for the last five years, according to data from Callan Associates.

The difference has prompted critics to claim that the funds are underreporting their unfunded liabilities, or the gap between what they've promised to pay retirees in the future and what they'll actually have on hand to cover the benefits.

Critics have called for public pensions to reduce their assumed rates of return to as little as 5 percent or less, which would cause unfunded liabilities to soar and likely leave taxpayers having to cover the difference.

But without the change, critics say, future generations will be left to deal with a financial bomb.

FINDINGS WITHIN RANGE OF SIMILAR STUDIES

Other studies have tried to measure the overall size of the problem. The Pew Center on the States found that the shortfall is about $766 billion. Moody's Investors Service said in July that the collective gap would be $2.2 trillion if funds used a 5.5 percent discount rate.

Milliman has studied the health of the 100 largest private pension funds for about a decade. But this is its first study of public plans, conducted specifically to determine whether the systems were using unrealistically high return-rate assumptions as the critics claimed.

"I thought that we would find fairly pervasive use of interest rates that are high relative to current market consensus about future investment returns, and we didn't find that," Sielman said.

The firm, which has done actuarial work for nearly all of the U.S. states in the past, examined each individual fund in the study, using market valuations instead of smoothed valuations to measure assets and recalibrating liabilities based on Milliman's own benchmarks of expected long-term returns.

The firm found that the median discount rate should actually be 7.65 percent, rather than the 8 percent median rate the funds used in aggregate.

A third of the plans were using lower rates than they needed to, Milliman found, according to Sielman.

A small number of plans seriously underreported their liabilities because they use rates that are too high, Milliman found.

Milliman's study did not name the specific plans that underreported their liabilities. Sielman said the firm was not releasing its results for individual plans.

(In second to last paragraph corrects to "rates that are too high" from "too low")

(Editing by Gary Hill)