Two separate lawsuits challenging the state Employees’ Retirement System are going to the Hawai‘i Supreme Court.
The state ERS provides retirement benefits for thousands of state and county employees, from teachers and firefighters to judges and elected politicians. But two retired employees have been embroiled for years in lawsuits attempting to claim disability benefits from the system.
This week, the state Supreme Court accepted applications to hear both of those cases.
The first case arose from a complaint by Allan Zachary, a former employee of the state Department of Human Services. According to court records, Zachary, now 81, retired in 2008 after he allegedly found that lingering physical and mental impacts from a series of work-related accidents made it unable for him to continue working.
Zachary claimed that a 2004 car crash and a 2005 fall at his office led to constant pain in his legs, back, neck and foot, rendering him unable to sit, stand or walk for prolonged periods. Consequently, upon his retirement, he applied via the ERS for service-related disability benefits.
Zachary’s application was allegedly not reviewed until 2011. In 2012, the ERS medical board concluded that he had not been incapacitated, and therefore was not eligible for the benefits he sought.
A contested case the following year ended the same way, and in 2014, Zachary attempted to appeal the case. Only in 2019 did he get a response from ERS asking if he was continuing the appeal; when he said yes, it took another two years for another response.
These delays are the subject of Zachary’s Supreme Court case: passing over his potential disability, Zachary’s attorneys argue that Hawai‘i statutes require the ERS to respond to applicants within a reasonable amount of time. The delays, which Zachary’s attorneys describe as lasting more than 14 years, “cannot under any circumstances” be considered a reasonable amount of time.
The second case arises from Robert Gomes Jr., who was employed by the Hawai‘i County Department of Public Works between 1999 and 2016.
Gomes claimed that he suffered mental health impacts stemming from a 2015 incident during which a coworker came to his house and demanded financial compensation from an earlier encounter where Gomes reportedly dented the coworker’s van door. Gomes claimed to have been traumatized by the encounter — court records indicate the coworker later pled guilty to third-degree terroristic threatening following the incident — and applied for disability compensation, which was later granted.
However, Gomes alleged that he was later marginalized at work following the incident, and that his supervisor changed the requirements of his job in order to find Gomes, a diabetic, unfit to work, leading to a demotion.
Consequently, upon Gomes’ retirement in 2019, he also applied for service-related disability benefits, on the grounds that the county had found him unable to continue to work due to a disability following a workplace incident (the confrontation).
As in Zachary’s case, Gomes’s claim was rejected, leading to a contested case and court appeal, which also ended in the ERS’ favor. Like Zachary, the ERS medical board found Gomes to not have been incapacitated and therefore ineligible for disability benefits.
While the Supreme Court agreed this week to hear both cases, only Gomes’ case will go to oral arguments. No court date has been scheduled in either case.
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