How would you like to retire from your job and still get 100 percent of your salary?
How about retiring at 166 percent of your salary - part of it tax-free?
Sound impossible?
Not if you work for the City of Philadelphia.
Dozens of disabled city pensioners currently make thousands of dollars more each year in retirement than they earned working at their city jobs.
They do it by collecting benefits from both the city pension fund and the state worker's compensation system - a form of double-dipping that has persisted for almost two decades.
Is it legal? Absolutely.
Should the rules allow it?
"There is clearly something wrong with a system that pays a man more for not working than for working," city Finance Director Irvin Davis said of the practice.
That was back in 1977.
Eleven years later, in 1988, city Controller Jack Smithyman estimated that the city was paying millions of dollars a year in worker's compensation benefits to people who were already receiving city pensions.
"With the city's budget as tight as it is, a laissez faire attitude in controlling costs is hardly affordable," Smithyman said in a report to Mayor Goode.
Today, with the city struggling to stay afloat, almost 500 city pensioners double dip from the worker's compensation payroll, adding an estimated $6 million to the city's soaring disability costs.
"And you thought only the queen of England makes more money for not working?" says Steve Sawyer, the city lawyer who administers the worker's compensation program. "Welcome to Philadelphia."
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How does it work? A couple of ways.
A city employee who is injured on the job may apply for worker's compensation benefits, which would pay two-thirds of his or her working salary, tax-free.
Or, the employee may apply to the city pension board for a service- connected disability pension, which would pay 70 percent of the working wage, also tax-free.
By law, the employee can't collect both because that would be getting paid twice for the same injury.
But there are exceptions.
City law says nothing about combining worker's compensation benefits with other kinds of city pensions, such as service pensions or ordinary disability pensions, which compensate disabilities that are not incurred at work.
And that is where the generosity begins.
Consider the case of former firefighter John McGinn.
After 39 years with the city, McGinn retired in 1988 with serious health problems: chronic pleuritis and obstructive lung disease that doctors said was compatible with exposure to asbestos.
