Catching Illegal Raises
During Christine Gaiter's tenure as Treasurer on the Wellington Fire Protection District Board of Directors, she uncovered that the pension board had granted themselves a raise in violation of Colorado state law.
Under Colorado Revised Statutes 31-30-1112, a pension fund may only issue benefit increases when the fund is actuarially sound, meaning an independent actuarial analysis must confirm that the fund is financially healthy enough to support the added obligation. In this case, the pension board approved a raise for themselves despite the actuarial report specifically indicating that the fund did not meet the soundness threshold required by law. The raise was, by statute, illegal.
Rather than simply flagging the violation and moving on, Christine took it a step further. She spearheaded an effort to add concrete parameters directly into the pension fund's bylaws, establishing clear, defined benchmarks that the fund must meet before any future raises can be approved. Instead of leaving room for interpretation or willful misreading of state law, the updated bylaws now set objective funding thresholds that must be satisfied, removing ambiguity and making future violations far harder to commit.
This is accountability in action: not just catching a problem, but building the guardrails to prevent it from happening again.
See the PowerPoint presentation below that was presented to the Fire District Board.
During Christine Gaiter's tenure as Treasurer on the Wellington Fire Protection District Board of Directors, she uncovered that the pension board had granted themselves a raise in violation of Colorado state law.
Under Colorado Revised Statutes 31-30-1112, a pension fund may only issue benefit increases when the fund is actuarially sound, meaning an independent actuarial analysis must confirm that the fund is financially healthy enough to support the added obligation. In this case, the pension board approved a raise for themselves despite the actuarial report specifically indicating that the fund did not meet the soundness threshold required by law. The raise was, by statute, illegal.
Rather than simply flagging the violation and moving on, Christine took it a step further. She spearheaded an effort to add concrete parameters directly into the pension fund's bylaws, establishing clear, defined benchmarks that the fund must meet before any future raises can be approved. Instead of leaving room for interpretation or willful misreading of state law, the updated bylaws now set objective funding thresholds that must be satisfied, removing ambiguity and making future violations far harder to commit.
This is accountability in action: not just catching a problem, but building the guardrails to prevent it from happening again.
See the PowerPoint presentation below that was presented to the Fire District Board.