DETROIT (WXYZ) — Wayne County says it overpaid the pensions of two retired judges by more than a million dollars, 7 News Detroit has learned, and officials aren’t sure they’ll get any of the money back.
Watch Ross Jones' investigation in the video player below:
Last year, the Wayne County Retirement System quietly concluded that it had vastly overpaid the pensions of David Szymanski and Richard Hathaway, two retired circuit court judges who went on to work for the county in other capacities.
Szymanski’s pension was overpaid by $450,852 dating back to his 2015 retirement, according to the retirement system, while Hathaway's pension was overpaid by $595,700 since 2008.
A pension is based, in part, on the number of years an employee works and their highest years of pay. Szymanski spent 20 years on the Wayne County bench and Hathaway spent 24.
But judges aren’t normal county employees. The state actually pays most of a circuit court judge’s salary, with the county picking up the rest.
As a result, when a judge’s county pension in calculated, it’s based on how much of their salary was paid by the county: for Szymanski and Hathaway, that was about $43,000.
But when both men left the bench, they each took other jobs with Wayne County before retiring. Szymanski spent 5 more years working in the treasurer’s office, earning about $150,000 a year. Hathaway spent 11 years in the prosecutor’s office, making around $155,000.
The county based their pensions off those much higher salaries. Now they say they shouldn’t have.
The whole issue came to a head, ironically, because of a 2019 lawsuit filed by Szymanski. He sued Wayne County, alleging that officials failed to provide him with health benefits in retirement that he'd been promised.
But multiple courts ruled against Szymanski, deeming that—as a judge—he was not a county employee.
That ruling led the retirement system to seek a legal opinion about whether Szymanski's pension had been miscalculated when it treated his years of service on the bench as if he was a county employee.
Last year, the county decided that Szymanski’s $81,264 yearly pension should have been valued at $36,180, then looked into Hatahway's. They say his $101,268 pension should have come in $65,880.
Both Szymanski and Hathaway are now receiving the lower pensions, paid monthly.
'Do we get none of it back?'
“Do we take all the money back, do we get a portion of it back, do we get none of it back?” asked Alisha Bell, the chair of the Wayne County Commission and a member of the retirement board.
“Do we start fresh from where we know the calculation is currently?”
Bell and her fellow board members will consider what to do about the money as soon as Monday when they hold their next board meeting.
“We want to make sure we’re working through it, make sure it’s equitable to those who are going to get a pension one day and to those gentlemen who have received an excess,” Bell said. “But that’s what they were told, what they were promised.”
County Executive Warren Evans isn’t as diplomatic.
Earlier this month, he sent a letter to the retirement board after hearing that members planned to reach a settlement with one of the judges that “would not require him to pay back any of the more than $500,000 he improperly received.”
“I have utter contempt for this result,” Evans wrote, adding that he’ll “do everything in my power, publicly and privately, to prevent this miscarriage of justice.”
Today, the Wayne County pension system is only 70% funded: a big improvement from where it used to be, but nowhere near enough to cover all its obligations.
In an interview, Bell was asked by Channel 7’s Ross Jones if she can “commit right now that forgiving this money is off the table.”
Bell responded: “I cannot commit to that.”
'I was counting on this.'
Not all board members are lining up behind Evans' request to pursue the money. In part, that’s because Judge Szymanski has gone to court, asking another judge to stop the county from reducing his pension.
By phone, Szymanski told 7 News Detroit that it was the county that calculated his pension in the first place, and it’s not fair that he be punished for their own change of heart.
“I was counting on this for my financial planning in my retirement,” he said. “I’ve lived that way for ten years. And now they want to change it.”
Szymanski's legal action is ongoing. Judge Hathaway, who has not filed suit against the county, declined to comment.
Rank-and-file county employees won’t get a vote on what happens with the money, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have an opinion.
At a meeting in Detroit last week, about 50 Wayne County workers jammed into a conference room to meet with financial advisors and talk about their futures.
If they were on the receiving end of an extra half-million dollars, they told 7 News Detroit that they’d be expected to pay it back.
“If it were me and I was overpaid," said county employee Clertesia Anderson, "obviously I would have to pay it back."
Contact 7 Investigator Ross Jones at ross.jones@wxyz.com or at (248) 827-9466.
