Exactly the example I had in mind. The spiking is particularly heinous. For readers unfamiliar with the practice, the idea is by giving the employee a last minute raise, their variable for their final pension formula would be adjusted accordingly. Sure it doesn't matter in the individual case, but multiplied out by all employees and you just increased your pension obligations by 10%!
Another example is allowing the employee preferential access to overtime in the last year, or them exercising unused vacation time as a one-time cash payout on retirement.
The overtime thing is the most galling, since it's generally straight-up theft of government resources. There's no legitimate government purpose to the extra hours. The theft is culturally accepted by government employees because it costs more than garden-variety timecard fraud -- you don't just get to steal the marginal hour's pay, you get to steal X0% of that every year for the rest of your life, automatically. And it becomes culture in these institutions -- you cover for others because you expect someone to cover for you once it is your turn.
> The overtime thing is the most galling, since it's generally straight-up theft of government resources. There's no legitimate government purpose to the extra hours.
That's true in some extreme cases, though the more usual case is simply bias in which employees get assigned legitimate overtime, in which case there is a legitimate government purpose in the extra hours, it's just that the cost to the government of those extra hours is unnecessarily maximized.
Though in either case I wouldn't say either form of overtime spi king is the most galling form of spiking.
> Technically it's 90% of peak salary but "spiking" is culturally accepted, so in practice you can have more than 100% of your final year salary in pension benefits.
A "last minute" raise has essentially no effect, since even before the recent move to a 36-month base, the pension base was the average of the highest 12 months.
"Spiking" isn't last-minute raises, it's a catch-all name for a wide variety of strategies (some of which are merely reasonable and legitimate tactics given the rules, and some of which are outright frauds on their own which have greater effect when combined with tactical timing with the retirement rules) for maximizing pension base by (under the 12-month rule) maximizing pay in the last 12 months. Among the strategies:
+ Securing a higher-base-pay for just that period (most abusively -- and also most rarely -- a collaboration with higher leadership to give an employee a highly paid position with paper duties to justify the high pay that the employee actually isn't expected to perform.)
+ Maximizing overtime, in positions eligible for overtime pay, during the last 12 months (again, with some notable abuses where the overtime work is work not really necessary to the agency mission or, in more extreme cases, outright fraudulent work-on-paper.)
+ Maximizing any non-base, non-overtime pay that figures into retirement base calculations.
