This former state employee is still fighting for his pension benefits — five years after retiring

This information “sent me over the edge,” Sorrentino said.

So in April, his attorney filed a complaint in federal court, claiming the delays are depriving Sorrentino of his due process rights guaranteed under the 14th Amendment.

Protracted delays like this are common in state retirement disputes, according to lawyers who have appeared before the appeals board. Some cases have dragged on for nearly a decade before they were decided — and can’t be challenged in court until then. Many retirees count on these benefits to get by, the lawyers say, and waiting years to receive them can be an incredible hardship.

Sorrentino estimates he’s spent more than 1,000 hours of his “golden years” trying to get the benefits he’s owed — and shed light on a broken system.

“A long time ago it stopped being about me. It’s much bigger,” he said. “Retirement benefits by their nature are time limited. Retirement’s the last chapter of life.”

And nobody should spend it fighting to get the benefits they’ve been promised, he said.

For Sorrentino, the dispute revolves around the administration of the New England Newborn Screening Program, which he was part of for more than 18 years at what is currently called the Massachusetts State Public Health Laboratory in Jamaica Plain. The program, which he ran for more than eight years, tests for treatable conditions in about 500 newborns a day in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Rhode Island. When Sorrentino started at the lab in 1980, he was paid by the Department of Public Health. But in 1990, the administration of the program was transferred to the Massachusetts Health Research Institute, which was incorporated in 1959 by the Massachusetts governor and health commissioner, among other founders, to assist the public health department.

In 1997, after the state Inspector General revealed financial improprieties involving MHRI, the newborn screening lab and other programs were transferred to UMass Chan Medical School.

Sorrentino hadn’t been allowed to make contributions to the state pension fund during his time under MHRI and withdrew what he had previously put in. But once under the umbrella of the state medical school, he started making contributions again, and later repaid all the funds in order to maximize his benefits.

This entire time, Sorrentino said, his job remained the same: He worked in the same lab, with the same people, using the same state ID badge.

Less than a year after the change to UMass Medical, he left the Jamaica Plain lab to work for a newborn screening company in Pittsburgh, and received regular letters over the next 20 years confirming his eligibility for retirement benefits. But when he applied for his roughly $1,400-a-month pension in late 2018, the retirement board informed him that employees who leave public service must return for at least two consecutive years in order to retire with benefits, rendering him ineligible.

Sorrentino was incredulous. He simply wanted the benefits he had been investing in. “It’s not like I’m asking for something that I didn’t contribute to,” he said.

He’s been fighting the denial ever since.

The Department of Public Health wouldn’t comment on why Sorrentino wasn’t considered a state employee for his entire tenure, despite working for the same program in the same lab the whole time, noting that he “resigned in 1990 and began working for MHRI” — a characterization Sorrentino disputes. The State Retirement Board would not provide details about why returning employees have to be on the job for two years in order to collect pensions they had previously earned.

The Contributory Retirement Appeal Board, known as CRAB, also declined to provide information about its caseload or wait times.

If CRAB rules against him, Sorrentino will get back the roughly $57,000 he contributed, including interest, according to the State Board of Retirement, but not any additional money he would have received through monthly payments for the rest of his life. Many public employees without the time or the means to fight the retirement board probably just give up and agree to these terms, Sorrentino said.

But considering the thousands of dollars in investments and interest his contributions have likely generated for the state over the past several decades, Sorrentino said, this outcome would be highly unfair. And if he were to die before the case is resolved, his survivors wouldn’t benefit from those gains.

“The pensioners are left out in the cold,” said Richard Glovsky, Sorrentino’s attorney.

The state’s employee retirement agencies move so slowly in part because they are vastly underresourced, said Leigh Panettiere, a Woburn-based attorney who represents public employees seeking disability retirement funds. During the appeal process, retirees’ contributions continue to generate interest and investment income for the overall pension plan — which in 2021 was only 69 percent funded, one of the lowest levels in the country, according to The Pew Charitable Trusts.

“There is no incentive to speed up the process,” said Panettiere, who currently has four CRAB cases that have been pending for more than four years.

But retirees get their full benefit amount, including retroactive payments, if the board decides in their favor. And given the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of members across the 104 public retirement systems in Massachusetts and less than 1,000 cases estimated to be in dispute — including many brought by retirees already receiving a pension — the impact of the money the pension funds stands to gain during the appeals process is insignificant, said Bill Keefe, executive director of the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission. The status of the state employees’ pension system is improving, he added, and on track to be fully funded by 2036.

One of Panettiere’s clients, a police officer, has been waiting for more than seven years for his case to be resolved. The officer had a heart attack on the job at the age of 50 that left him disabled, but due to a dispute over whether the incident was work related, he was granted a smaller pension than what he applied for. His current income is about half what it used to be, Panettiere said, forcing him to turn to family members to help pay his mortgage.

“In addition to feeling like a failure because he cannot work anymore, he is even more depressed by not being able to financially care for his family,” Panettiere said.

Another client, a public employee who suffered a head injury at work and has been trying to collect his pension since 2017, has cancer.

“He may die before his appeal is over,” she said.

Katie Johnston can be reached at katie.johnston@globe.com. Follow her @ktkjohnston.