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Deferred 25-percent pension will be disbursed this week
PERIOD COVERS JULY-SEPTEMBER
Retirees waiting for their deferred 25-percent pension for the period of July to September don’t need to wait long, after Gov. Eloy S. Inos assured Friday that the funds will be disbursed this week.
“We’ve communicated to the Settlement Fund since the initial agreement is they will issue the payments for the week of Oct. 5. So that will be next week. [Retirees should expect their pensions] anytime next week if the Settlement Fund is ready and prepared. We’ve basically asked them to go and issue out the disbursement,” the governor said last Friday’s proclamation signing designating October as National Disability Employment Awareness Month.
Inos also clarified that the government is working on bringing up to date the pension payments for retirees to reflect 100 percent of the pensions due to them instead of the current 75 percent because of the Settlement Fund agreement.
“They’re basically getting 100 percent. What happens is they will continue to get the 75 percent and all we need to do is pump in the other 25 percent. Our recommendation is to go ahead and make those payments as the pensions are paid on a semi-monthly basis. Basically, the combined payments will be equivalent to 100 percent.”
The governor also assured retirees that there is still money left from the $30 million paid by Best Sunshine International Ltd. to develop an integrated casino resort on Saipan.
“There’s money reserved for this. There’s some balance left from the $30 million payment so the secretary of Finance is making the cash allocations for all these payments. It’s not one of those things where we need to issue big chunks of payments because we accumulated the deferral that way. I figure the equivalent of 25 percent in semi-monthly disbursements is approximately $500,000. The secretary of Finance has begun to set aside those funds so we can pay them every 15 days as opposed to a big chunk,” he said.
Retirees’ nine-month payments, covering Oct. 1, 2013, to June 30, 2014, have already been released. The payments for the July to September quarter are expected in early October. Under the original agreement, future disbursements of restored 25 percent pension will be made on a quarterly basis.
