An ambitious project is underway that would require state and local governments to reveal the true costs of their pension promises and provide better numbers. While the effort is likely to take years, the overall goal is to change the ways in which pension figures are calculated, so that governments can no longer claim that they unknowingly implemented a pension scheme that they would be unable to fund in the future. The question of whether government accounting is essentially flawed has become the subject of intense debate among actuaries.
See "Government Rule Makers Looking at Pensions", Mary Williams Walsh, The New York Times, July 10, 2008