Don’t assume a regular paycheck stays regular

Yonkers: To Celia Sporer (“CUNY must fix its pension mess,” op-ed, May 21): You have my absolute sympathy regarding your issue with the CUNY pension debacle. To have to make up seven years of deductions plus interest over the next 14 years on top of regular payroll deductions is a financial nightmare. I am a retired NYC teacher and suffered through many blunders dealing with the Department of Education, my tax-deferred annuity and pension. The Teachers’ Retirement System changed my pension beneficiary to an unknown person, told me if I died, my wife would not receive my benefits, removed five years of service from my work history because the supervisor who signed off on the documentation no longer worked for NYC, and removed more than three years of time bought back from my wife’s work history. The DOE charged me eight days of sick time for four days of absences, docked me a week’s pay under the Taylor Law in the ‘70s when I was not working, married me off while I was single so my deductions were screwed up for more than a year, took more than four years to rectify line-of-duty reimbursements, tax consequences and TDA issues for my wife and gave me at least six W-2s during my career that did not match up mathematically with my paystubs from their respective tax years.

I absolutely know where you are coming from. I corrected every mistake mentioned above. It was time-consuming and extremely frustrating. The end result was, however, they were corrected along with any back pay plus interest. You simply can’t wait seven years without looking at your paperwork and hoping the city gets it right. Alan Newman