Tanner v. CalPERS

Plaintiff Joseph Tanner sought to overturn a decision of defendant California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) that significantly reduced his expected retirement benefit. The Court of Appeal found that Tanner’s argument appeared to be that under contract principles, he and the city made a mutual mistake in entering into a November 2006 agreement because they thought all of his compensation in that agreement could be used to calculate the amount of his retirement benefit, and when CalPERS informed them otherwise, they reformed the agreement to achieve their original intent by folding various miscellaneous items of compensation in the November 2006 agreement into his new, greater base salary in the March 2007 agreement. The Court concluded, however, that Tanner’s appeal was without merit regardless of these contract arguments, or any of the other arguments Tanner made. The Court agreed with the trial court that the greater base salary in the March 2007 agreement did not qualify as Tanner’s payrate for purposes of calculating the amount of his retirement benefit because that salary was not paid pursuant to a publicly available pay schedule. For this reason, Tanner had no right to have his retirement benefit calculated based on that greater base salary. View "Tanner v. CalPERS" on Justia Law