For nearly five months, employees of Lake Park, Florida, had no way to confirm whether roughly $60,000 a month in pension contributions, 3% of their pay plus a 14% town match, was actually being invested, according to WLRN NPR News. The town had told workers its pension migration to the Florida Retirement System took effect on 1 July 2025, but two administrators failed to submit key paperwork and never spoke to resolve it, leaving the town unenrolled in FRS entirely.
How Lake Park’s pension migration went wrong
The town was meant to complete its move from a Corebridge Financial-administered pension to the Florida Retirement System by 1 July 2025. On 24 April 2025, FRS bureau chief Hobart Lawrance emailed both Finance Director Barbara Gould and then-Assistant Town Manager Bambi McKibbon-Turner, telling them the town still needed to send employee information along with four required documents to complete the enrollment. A follow-up reminder went unanswered in June, and on 16 June, just two weeks before the enrollment was due to go live, McKibbon-Turner forwarded the email to Gould asking how she could help. The two never spoke about it, and the paperwork was never submitted.
Employees’ months of unanswered questions
Believing they were enrolled, employees soon found they couldn’t access their accounts online and began emailing Gould directly, questions that never reached Reade. In August, one worker asked where to elect their FRS plan; Gould told them to wait for a welcome packet. By September, an employee reported being told by FRS that she wasn’t in the system at all. In October, another employee contacted FRS directly and was told they do not see the town of Lake Park as an active participant in the plan at all, a claim confirmed by a senior FRS team member, according to WLRN.
The whistleblower who pushed for an investigation
Laura Mochi, a cashier in the Finance Department who had watched employees’ concerns go unaddressed, called FRS Director Kathy Gould in late October to tell her the town had been collecting pension payments without ever formally joining FRS. Kathy Gould referred the matter to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, and an FDLE investigator later reached Barbara Gould on 3 November. That same week, Mochi filed a report with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office and, on 5 November, submitted a complaint to the Palm Beach County Inspector General’s Office, backed by emails documenting the missed communications.
Town manager Rich Reade’s response and the ongoing inspector general probe
Reade said he only learned of the problem on 5 November, after which he completed the outstanding paperwork himself in roughly 10 to 15 minutes, retroactively enrolling the town in FRS effective 1 December, backdated to 1 July. He suspended Gould for three days in December for “concealing defective work,” while placing responsibility on McKibbon-Turner, who had overseen the transition before resigning on 31 July. Reade told commissioners in November that no financial penalty applied, though the town would need to cover employees’ lost investment earnings, an amount the town is still calculating through a separate actuarial report tied to a union grievance, while the Inspector General’s investigation into the broader episode also remains unfinished.
