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By: FEDweek StaffA committee report urges that the Senate follow the House’s lead in passing a bill (HR-521) to address what it calls an unfair provision of the special retirement rules for federal first responders.
“Upon injury, agencies can reassign injured first responders into other civil service positions, but often such reassignment disqualifies these employees from their prior eligibility for enhanced retirement benefits. For other federal employees, current law grants civil servants who overcome their injuries with the right to be placed into “equivalent positions” upon returning to work in federal government, which enables them to continue to contribute their valuable skills and experience to agency operations without losing their retirement benefits,” it says.
“However, in the case of federal first responders who are suddenly injured, returning to an equivalent, physically demanding position that offers enhanced retirement benefits is often not feasible,” it says.
In that situation, it adds, they fall under standard retirement policies and lose the credit for the higher contributions they pay into the retirement system as well as the earlier eligibility for retirement and the higher retirement benefits calculation.
It gave as an example a wildland firefighter who was injured in a parachute jump who was not able to return to that type of position and “lost the 12 years of higher contributions he had paid into the enhanced retirement system, and now he must complete a 30-year career in order to fulfill requirements for his retirement rather than the previously prescribed 20-year career guaranteed to federal first responders upon entry into public service.”
The bill may be considered as an amendment to the Defense Department authorization bill when it is considered in the Senate in the post-election session of Congress.
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