| Comment Number: | OL-10500978 |
| Received: | 2/23/2005 1:48:13 AM |
| Subject: | Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, Request for Comment |
| Title: | National Security Personnel System |
| CFR Citation: | 5 CFR Chapter XCIX and Part 9901 |
| No Attachments |
Comments:
PLEASE TRY TO PRESERVE THE “HIGH THREE” AVERAGE USED TO COMPUTE RETIREMENT The high three salary which is used to compute retirement is usually the last 3 of one’s career. Any increase or decrease in these last 3 years is therefore magnified many times over. I hope and request that some preservation or stabilization of salary as it applies to retirement computation can be incorporated. Even if a higher paid senior employee must suffer a stagnant salary due to a difficult year or 2 toward the end of his or her career; it is not fair to retroactively continue that adversity for the rest of his or her life. An arrangement to apply COLAS to previous years’ salaries to compute a high-three separate and distinct from the fluctuating yearly salary would still provide for rewarding high performers and penalizing low performers for any particular year. Salaries will begin to flatten with time even for high performing older workers as it becomes more and more difficult to justify increases when compared to other high performing newer workers. This will lower retirement pensions but adversely affect recruitment. If the intention is to encourage earlier than planned retirement of a senior worker considered overpaid, it may have the opposite effect by causing a decision to delay retirement until one’s additional years made up for a less than expected salary.