Tuesday, March 24, 2009

DA Investigators and Grandfathered Rights

If you are DA Investigator in the 20 Year Plan and you were previously in the 25 Year Plan, you still have rights under the 25 Year Plan. That means that if you have more than 23 years of credited service, the benefit under the 25 Year Plan may be better than the 20 Year Plan. NYCERS should be comparing both benefits and giving you the better of the two. Make sure that NYCERS does the comparison. They may just do the 20 Year Plan calculation assuming it is the better benefit.

On September 13, 2006 the DAI 20 Year Plan was upgraded by law to include non-DAI service. The new calculation was carefully modeled on the 20 Year Police Pension Plan calculation. There are, however, certain cases where the old calculation may produce a better benefit than the new calculation. If you were a member of the DAI 20 Year Plan before September 13, 2006 and you have more than 23 years of DA Investigator service, the old calculation may give you a better benefit since it uses a three year average for excess DAI service rather than the over 20 year average. The more excess DAI service you have, the more the old calculation is better for you. If, however, you have non-DAI service, only the new calculation will give you credit for it.

Again, this is a situation where NYCERS should be comparing different calculations. You always should make sure that NYCERS is doing the calculation and not assuming that the new calculation is better.

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