How to Improve Pension Transparency

Reviewing a public pension fund's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report does not necessarily make it possible to answer basic questions, such as: how much do we owe? How much do the pension benefits we provide cost? And how can we expect pension contributions to change over the next several years? Without the answers to these questions, lawmakers do not know what kind of pension reform their jurisdictions need--and relatedly, many recent pension reforms have been underwhelming.