Saul a calming? force in the storm

PLANNING AHEAD: Zachary J. Saul, director of finance, Employees Retirement System of Rhode Island, says that some of the state pension reforms implemented in 2011 have helped and will continue to do so. He's pictured here with Stacey Whitton, left, and senior accountant Erica Kwiatkowski. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
PLANNING AHEAD: Zachary J. Saul, director of finance, Employees Retirement System of Rhode Island, says that some of the state pension reforms implemented in 2011 have helped and will continue to do so. He's pictured here with Stacey Whitton, left, and senior accountant Erica Kwiatkowski. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

Arguably the most disputed pie in Rhode Island during the last several years is the financial one that state workers believed they were getting during their decades of employment, versus the one that they’re going to actually be receiving, when all is said and done.

The state employee pension fight will go down in the annals of the state’s most contentious and drawn-out political disputes. And it is not difficult to understand why: A lot of people are fighting over what represents a lot of money to each and every one of them.

Despite the uproar surrounding the pension money in so many reaches of the state – or maybe because of it – the individual charged with actually protecting the funds is a calm man.

And he is also the winner of Providence Business News’ CFO Award for those in government: Zachary Saul.

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Eight miles south of the Statehouse, in the new Warwick headquarters of the Employees’ Retirement System of Rhode Island, Director of Finance Saul projected calm in a recent phone interview.

Was he concerned about the efforts of Edward Siedle, a self-styled “financial watchdog” and Forbes writer who was halfway toward raising the $20,000 on Kickstarter he said he needed to perform a “follow-up forensic investigation” of the Rhode Island state pension?

Not especially. People have been putting pressure on the state’s pension, and other states’ pensions, for years now. Did he not think that Siedle, who possesses a crisp resume and worked for years as an SEC attorney, might be a little different?

“Yes and no,” Saul said. “The pension is a public trust fund with contributions from employees that pay into the trust and we build ourselves as trying to be as open and transparent as possible. As not just the Rhode Island plan, but all state and municipal plans across the country have seen an increased amount of interest over the last three or four years if not longer.”

Saul, who has a bachelor’s in accountancy from George Washington University and an MBA from Salve Regina University, said that the retirement kitty for state employees, specifically, that he looks after was funded to 57.4 percent as of June 30, 2014 – the last date for which hard data had been collected.

Could he say whether things had trended in a positive direction since that time and what the goal might be 12 months from now?

“We have a funding policy in place, and that is designed to get us to 100 percent funded status,” Saul said. “What we’re doing now is we’re working in amortizing the unfunded liability, and assuming we’ll hit all our assumptions, our plan will be 100 percent funded at a future date.”

How many times a day did he observe himself checking the market?

“Not often, in the morning, at night,” Saul said. “I do stay on it, though, it helps me know where we are.”

Rhode Island is far from the only state to find itself in a pension squeeze, of course. New Hampshire, Louisiana, Illinois, Connecticut and Kentucky have all found themselves in similar straits.

“Other states have moved up, and have moved from a lower-funded status to a healthy status,” Saul said. “We’re on our way. We believe the things that we’re doing will get us there. Some of the reforms from 2011 have helped and will continue to help.”

Saul was referring to – then-treasurer and now governor – Gina M. Raimondo’s reworking of the pension system that eventually came to be known as the Rhode Island Retirement Security Act of 2011, which was approved by wide margins in both houses of the state legislature and signed into law by then-Gov. Lincoln D. Chafee.

“Other states have done this, there’s no one magic formula to do it,” Saul said. “You can’t take what State X did and say, ‘This is going to work.’ The best plan is more money in and less money out. That’s what every state’s goal is.”

Among the things for which Saul is responsible for is information technology. And IT has been occupying him as his office oversees a transition from a 15-year-old, mainframe-based system to a cutting-edge, Web-based system. With information as sensitive as that under his purview, security is paramount, Saul said.

“We have a huge amount of sensitive information and security is the very highest value for us,” Saul said. “We’re constantly auditing our IT environment, having auditors come in and do penetration testing, and looking at our procedures that have us up-to-date and as close to best practices as they can be.” •

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