Committee advances bill raising small‑overpayment waiver threshold and defining ‘major fraction’ for service credit

Senate Bill 851 was advanced by the House Committee on Labor and Workplace Standards on April 23 after an extended work session that focused on two technical PERS changes: raising the dollar threshold under which the Public Employees Retirement Board may waive recovery of overpayments and defining the statutory standard for accrual of a month of service credit.

Heather Case, Senior Policy Advisor at PERS, told the committee that for waiver‑purposes the agency aggregates overpayments and improperly made payments into invoices and that in the 2024 calendar year the total dollars that resulted in invoices was about $17,000,000 — roughly two‑tenths of 1% of annual benefit expenditures. She said outstanding receivables at year‑end were about $11,000,000, noting many of those are placed on payment plans and much of the invoiced amount results from…