Johnson and Lavine: Tax pension abusers
The proviso in New York’s public pension system that ensures even convicted embezzlers can continue to collect retirement benefits has long been a sore point with a lot of people, and nowhere is that more evident than in the Long Island community of Roslyn where the former school superintendent Frank Tassone fleeced taxpayers for more than $2 million and was sent to prison in 2006.
Now, a pair of Long Island Democrats, Sen. Craig Johnson and Assemblyman Charles Lavine, are offering a measure that could end this benefit — not by changing constitutionally protected pension laws — but by calling for an assessment or tax on the pensions of criminals who abused public monies.
The “taxpayer abuse assessment” would be equal to the annual pension of the person in question. “If you abuse the taxpayers’ trust, you simply don’t deserve a taxpayer-funded pension,” Johnson said of the proposed measures, S.6823A and A9960A.
Read the rest here: http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/24886/johnson-and-lavine-tax...
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