The Cook County treasurer’s office has issued a correction after its latest tax bills understated Chicago’s unfunded pension debt by more than $37 billion.
First-installment tax bills mailed last week listed Chicago’s unfunded health care and pension debt as $37,271,645 — billions of dollars less than the city actually owes.
The actual unfunded pension liability of the city is $37,271,645,937. That’s some $37,234,374,292 higher than the erroneous figure on the tax bills.
The city’s total health care and pension debt was listed as $47.1 million instead of billion.
Treasurer Maria Pappas said her office caught the mistake Monday, which was printed on 800,000 tax bills, and she was in the process of correcting the number online.
“S--- happens,” Pappas told the Chicago Sun-Times.
She said employees in her office working on a yearly tax report had discovered the error and reached out to the city of Chicago, which she said provided the incorrect pension debt information.
The city confirmed the mistake Tuesday, she said, and her office was in the process of correcting the numbers online Wednesday when a Sun-Times reporter called about it.
A city employee blamed it on a “key punch error,” according to an email exchange provided by the treasurer’s office.
Pappas doesn’t plan to mail a correction — only to correct the bills online.
The incorrect data shown on tax bills did not affect any payment amounts, her office said in a statement issued later Wednesday.
The treasurer’s office is required by law to post the pension debt of taxing districts on property tax bills. The law, written by Pappas, was implemented in 2016.
North Sider Ed Bachrach noticed the incorrect pension debt number while studying his tax bill and notified the Sun-Times.
“When I saw our debt went down by 37 billion, I said, ‘What’s going on here?’”
Bachrach isn’t exactly a layman. He has studied city pensions for over a decade and is founder of the group Center for Pension Integrity.
“So I pay attention,” he said.
Most people struggle to tell the difference between millions and billions, Bachrach said.
To understand this, he plays a thought experiment with people. “I ask them, in standard units of time, how long is a million seconds?” People guess what they do, and he tells them the answer is 12 days.
“Now, how long is a billion seconds?” he asks. Most people answer some time around a month.
“It’s actually 32 years. There’s a huge difference between 37 million and 37 billion,” Bachrach said.
Or as Illinois Republican U.S. Sen. Everett Dirksen once famously may or may not have said, ”A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
