By Paul Gottbrath, Post staff reporter

The Ohio Police & Fireman's Disability & Pension Fund is fining the city of Cincinnati $53,000 for problems with a monthly report it filed in April.

Yet City Finance Director Tim Riordan says the problem was caused by a glitch in the way the pension fund's computer system interpreted a few lines on the report, and the city consequently will contest the fine if the pension fund will not reconsider it.

The report, filed on a computer diskette, showed asterisks instead of numbers on lines where payroll hours were supposed to be listed, said Allen Proctor, the fund's executive director.

Under a 1998 state law, that requires the fund to fine the city 5 percent of the payroll in the report, Proctor said.

Riordan, who learned of the problem from The Post Wednesday afternoon, said after checking into it that the pension fund's computer system was set up to read worker hour totals only up to three digits.

For a few employees who retired that month, compensatory time, sick leave and vacation pushed their hour totals to four digits, he said.

''We sent them the correct numbers, their system converted them to asterisks,'' he said.

The city had used the same methodology in previous months, and the pension fund had accepted those reports, he said.

Proctor said the city payroll processing department was notified by letter June 21 of the problem with the April report, and notification of the fine was sent to the department July 13. The city will be billed for the fine in August and have 30 days to pay it.

Cincinnati worked for six to nine months to develop an electronic re porting system acceptable to the fund, Riordan said, and met a March 31 deadline to have that task completed. Proctor said Cincinnati was current on payments to the fund and, in fact, paid off in March the remaining $41 million in unfunded liability from when it joined the fund in 1967. Cities have until 2035 to make good on those debts, and Cincinnati's early payment will save it about $300,000 a year, Riordan said.

Proctor said he did not consider Cincinnati's report problem ''a big deal. It's a data processing issue.''

Riordan said even if Cincinnati is responsible for the problem, ''the penalty needs to fit the crime. They need to reconsider this legislation, so that if you make a little computer glitch, you're not facing a fine of this magnitude.''

Publication date: 07-20-00

http://www.cincypost.com/news/pensn072000.html

-- Doris (reaper1@mindspring.com), July 20, 2000