By John Brummett

For several years now, state and local governments in Arkansas have allowed employees to take retirement after 28 years, then, at the end of some period of deactivation, come back on the payroll, even to keep doing the same work.

This is commonly called a “double dip.”

This retirement plan was noncontributory from 1977 to 2005, meaning one costing employees nothing. In some cases, elected officials get two years of employment credit for every one year worked.

Sweet deal, that is to say.

Many of the rest of us have funneled everything we can afford into a tax-deferred 401(k) only to watch these holdings collapse while Wall Street got bailed out for squandering our money.

That’s not the public employees’ fault.

But now State Rep. Allen Kerr of Little Rock has uncovered a fine mess, either in traces or widespread. We don’t yet know. I don’t think it will prove as rampant as the 200 cases about which he is speculating. But that’s just a hunch.

Some elected county officials and, perhaps, municipal officials — elected, I repeat — apparently have taken themselves off the payroll for 90 days, stayed on the job without pay during those 90 days as if nothing had changed, then declared themselves to have retired on account of having gone without pay for those 90 days.

Then they have gone back on the public payroll and begun accepting retirement benefits at the same time. Nothing in the world had changed except they suddenly were getting two checks.

Either their retirement was bogus or their interim public service was bogus. They can’t have it both ways.

You could do this very thing legally by being open and legitimate about it. By that I mean you could actually leave the elected employment at least for 90 days, or, under the latest revision in the law, 180 days, which still isn’t long enough, it seems to me.

You’d make an announcement of your retirement. You would be formally replaced. You would go off the health insurance plan and start paying all of your own premiums. Then, if you wanted, you could run for this office, though not as an incumbent, and get elected to it again if the voters were persuaded.

Actually, former Gov. Mike Huckabee issued an executive order for state employees that said positions vacated by retirement had to be subjected to normal hiring procedures. In other words, the early-retiree couldn’t ease back into the old job automatically without applying and getting affirmatively rehired. But that’s just for state government and these abuses are reported in local governments and in positions filled by elections.

The Division of Legislative Audit is probing this affair. I asked Kerr what he’d propose to do about it, when we get all the facts.

The first thing he said was that it was a misdemeanor to make false assertions on your retirement documents. So this first-term Republican legislator, whom some are touting as the loyal Republican challenger to Gov. Mike Beebe’s re-election in 2010, wants to bring these people up on charges, albeit minor ones.

The second was that these retirements ought to be nullified and the recipients made to pay back their benefits, be it a lump sum, an installment plan or by waiting longer to start getting benefits when they properly retire. That’s infinitely better than nullifying all the public actions taken by these persons while they were pretending to be retired.

Third, yes, he laments that the county and local governments employing these pretend-retirees ought to be made to catch up on the retirement contributions they haven’t been making.

Some will want to outlaw double-dipping altogether. But that’s an over-reaction. Only three states, or so I’m told, have retirement programs that bar retired public employees from ever coming back on the public payroll.

Sometimes a retiree needs to go back to work. Sometimes the state agency needs that retired employee’s experience and expertise.

But this is a very generous gravy boat that these people are double-dipping from. More restrictions are called for, by which I mean, at least, putting into the law longer periods of real deactivation along with those normal hiring procedures for retirement-created vacancies as contained in Huckabee’s old executive order for state employees.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.