PERS Retirement Info Is Public Info
Carson City judge James Russell told the Nevada Public Employees Retirement System to release the names of all retired employees including their benefits by January 4, 2012. The Reno Gazette-Journal sued to get the information several years ago. The following will be public: names, salary, retirement dates and benefit amounts.
Russell’s reasoning is that if the legislature wanted the records confidential they would have made them that way in the law but they did not. Individual member’s files would still be confidential.
“Gazette-Journal prevails in lawsuit; public retirement program must turn over information“, Reno Gazette Journal, December 22, 2011.
Nevada State Employee Focus 
I believe that the judge’s ruling is wrong and should be appealed. I am no longer a public employee, but a private citizen, entitled to the same rights to privacy as those who collect Social Security benefits, since PERS was set up as a replacement for Social Security benefits for state employees and state employees were not afforded the option of opting out of PERS and were compelled to participate in PERS, whether they wanted to or not. Additionally, the information released by PERS on many state employees will be skewed and misleading. For instance, many state retirees, such as myself, purchased retirement time from PERS, which cost many of them well in excess of $100,000.00, and cost many more thousands upon thousands of dollars, which they would not recoup for several years after their retirement. Therefore, the actual benefit information released on such retirees will not reveal the fact that several years of their pension incomes were paid by their own personal funds, paid to the State of Nevada in order to purchase retirement time. Additionally, since the money used by many retirees to purchased retirement time may not have been derived from their employment with the State of Nevada, but from financial investments, spouses, or other family members, the benefit amount received by such a purchase of retirement time should be excluded from the information released, most especially since the information released will not reveal that sizable portion of their pension benefit was not paid by taxpayers, but by the individual retiree.