Retirement Years Recovered by Norton Bill Passed Today (4/1/09)

Retirement Years Recovered by Norton Bill Passed Today

April 1, 2009

WASHINGTON, DC - The House of Representatives this afternoon passed Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton's bill to restore retirement time lost by employees when their District agencies were transferred to federal jurisdiction under the 1997 Balanced Budget Reconciliation Act, in order to bring the city out of a serious financial crisis in the late 1990s. The Congresswoman's bill corrects an oversight that has seriously short-changed hundreds of employees who worked for the District of Columbia Courts, the Pretrial Services Agency, the Department of Corrections, and the Adult Probation and Parole Services before those agencies were transferred to federal authority. Norton, who has introduced this bill for years, attached it to another bill, the Federal Retirement Reform Act, which passed today. "These employees were involuntarily transferred to the federal government and came hoping for the best, but got an employee's worst nightmare. Nothing is more valuable to an employee than credit for time worked. Many of these employees would have retired years ago, but found themselves locked in, hoping to reclaim time they had already given," Norton said. "'Overdue' does not capture a bill that corrects a government error that the government refused to act on for years. At least today, many years for hundreds of employees, who lost credit for their service towards retirement, will be restored."

Many employees lost "creditable service" years towards their retirement, accumulated when they were D.C. government employees, because some of the years they worked in those agencies prior to the federal transfers were not credited. The Norton bill allows time served by these employees before 1997 to count towards their overall retirement eligibility. No problem of "double-dipping" is involved because the employees are still entitled to their D.C. retirement benefits and the Norton bill does not count the pre-1997 years spent as D.C. government employees towards the amount of the federal retirement annuity an employee is eligible to receive.