The NYPD pension fund has a secret.
Publicly funded payments to NYPD retirees climbed 19 percent over the past decade, but the fund stubbornly refuses to identify its gold-plated beneficiaries.
“Taxpayers . . . have a right to know who they are, how much they are paid,” said Tim Hoefer, director of the Empire Center, an Albany-based think tank.
Hoefer is expected to announce an appeal today to a recent state Supreme Court decision upholding the pension fund’s refusal to provide a list of its 44,370 pensioners.
The Police Pension Fund stated that “releasing the names of retired members of the NYPD serves no legitimate public purpose; rather, it puts members’ and their families’ safety at risk.”
A list of individual pension amounts released by the fund showed that officers who retired in 2009 with regular service pensions averaged $58,563, up 19 percent from $49,066 for officers who retired in 2000.