In 2006, I penned "Will the Real Pension Deficit Please Stand Up?" as a way to draw attention to the urgent need to understand what reported numbers mean. Ten years later, questions remain about how best to measure defined benefit plan obligations. This is not a good situation, especially now when more than a few retirement plans are struggling. Click to review Governing.com's pension liability and funded status data for eighty plans.

Authors of a Citigroup paper entitled "The Coming Pensions Crisis" urge transparency regarding "the amount of underfunded governmental pension obligations." I concur but the challenge is knowing what information should be disclosed so that legislators, policy-makers, taxpayers and plan participants have confidence in what gets shared. I have often written that is hard to manage a problem if one cannot adequately measure the problem. 

In early July, Pensions & Investments' Hazel Bradford wrote about the Competitive Enterprise Institute's suggestion to use a "low-risk discount rate" tied to U.S. Treasury bond yields. Critics counter that this would grossly inflate the size of a deficit and perhaps lead to inappropriate actions. On August 3, it was reported that two actuarial groups disbanded a task force over the topic of how to best value public pension fund liabilities. (In terms of full disclosure, I co-authored a paper in 2008 with one of the groups mentioned, the Society of Actuaries. Click to read "Pension Risk Management: Derivatives, Fiduciary Duty and Process.")

As someone who has been trained as an appraiser, taught valuation principles and rendered opinions of value or reviewed those of others, I know firsthand that reasonable people can differ about inputs and assumptions. I likewise understand that snapshot pension debt levels do not necessarily convey a message about current or ongoing liquidity, debt capacity or the ability to tax. The goal is to reconcile differences so that anyone making decisions based on valuation numbers understands their strengths and weaknesses.