PUT ON HOLD BY CITY’S PENSION FUND
Lost loved ones to virus, now getting no answers from overwhelmed system
The city’s largest pension fund has been incommunicado with families who may be eligible for death benefits after their loved ones died from coronavirus, several sources with direct knowledge of the situation revealed.
The New York City Employees’ Retirement System — more commonly known as NYCERS — has failed to return an avalanche of calls on behalf of families attempting to claim death benefits from the pensions of transit workers who died from COVID-19, the sources told the Daily News.
Marcia Patoir lost her husband, Patrick, a former Marine combat veteran who worked in the NYC Transit subway equipment division, on March 30, five days after doctors put him on a ventilator.
Since then, Marcia, 56, and her daughter Nache, 34, have tried to untangle a nightmare of red tape just to get basic information about the benefits the family is entitled to.
“I’m very frustrated,” said Marcia. “It’s so much. I constantly have to take these anxiety pills.”
She and her husband owned two homes together — one in Brooklyn, where Marcia operated a day care, and another in Freehold, N.J. Without his pension benefits and the ability to work herself, she has struggled to make mortgage payments on both properties and has had to rely on her four children for financial help.
“Thank God for my children,” she said. “They don’t want to lose the houses, but they have rents to pay. It’s not fair to them.”
Her daughter Nache said that while an MTA liaison is trying to help the family communicate with NYCERS, the liaison has been unable to get a clear grasp of what’s going on with the family’s claim.
“My father passed in March,” she said. “How do you not have any information in July?”
Anthony Sparrow, the brother of Rodney Sparrow, a transit worker who handled subway track repairs and died from coronavirus in April, described a similar situation.
“I filled out the paperwork and still haven’t heard anything from them,” he said. “I don’t get the sense that they’re making it a priority.”
After losing Rodney, Anthony Sparrow’s sister died two months later, putting even more financial strain on the family, all of whom live in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
One woman who lost her transit worker husband to
COVID-19 had one word to describe her plight: “ridiculous.”
“I can’t get the right people to pay attention to what a s—t show this is about to be,” said another source with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The COVID death toll among MTA workers is now at a staggering 131. The families of those workers have been connected with family liaisons at the MTA who’ve been tasked with contacting NYCERS to cut through red tape, two sources said. For some of the families, the pension benefits may be their sole source of income.
But some liaisons have been unable to get through to
NYCERS because, with employees working from home, many of the calls are not being forwarded to their cell or home phones, one source said. Those who do get through receive very little, in terms of actionable information.
“NYCERS has been completely unresponsive,” the source said. “They’ve done nothing. They’re now telling us they’re months and months and months behind. This is not the time to be months and months and months behind. They’re months behind and we’re in the middle of a recession.”
NYCERS spokeswoman Regina Kahney said the fund’s call center is taking 1,300 calls a day and the fund has been “working on the processes necessary to claim the benefits and pay them.”
“We are deeply committed to providing the best possible service to the survivors of MTA employees and all NYCERS members who died from COVID-19-related illnesses,” she said. “We have been in contact with the MTA and have informed them that we are expediting the processing of these benefits.”
The MTA has separately set up death benefits for families of workers who died due to COVID, but those benefits also have not been released yet.
When they are, they’ll be contingent on obtaining a death certificate that lists COVID-19 as the cause of death, a challenge in itself as some coronavirus cases have been attributed to respiratory failure or other related causes.
All of this means that many families have only received vacation and back pay. Nache Patoir said her mother hasn’t even gotten that.
“It’s been really, really tough,” she said.
The son of one transit worker who died from coronavirus said his family is relying on a home equity loan to help make up for the loss of his father’s income.
“People who are renting don’t have that luxury,” said the son, who asked to remain anonymous.
And even once they get through to NYCERS, families might then have to prove that they contracted coronavirus while on the job, said another source familiar with the situation.
“These families deserve better,” said Tony Utano, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100 and a NYCERS board member. “They’ve each suffered a terrible loss, and the last thing they need is more pain and grief. NYCERS needs to fix this problem as quickly as possible.”