Nearly 60 retired state and county workers in Hawaii each receive government pensions of more than $100,000 annually.

Yet you — the public — can’t find out who they are.

Hawaii taxpayers do not have access to even basic pension data for retired state and county workers, even though the retirement system is funded with millions of dollars of public money.

The Employees’ Retirement System, the agency that administers benefits to 40,000 Hawaii retirees or their beneficiaries, says it is prohibited under state law from disclosing benefit payouts in individual cases.

If the 59 retirees getting six-figure pensions had retired in Arizona, California, Oregon, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York and at least 10 other states, their pension information would be public, accessible to anyone interested. Newspapers in some of those states occasionally do stories about the top-earning pensioners.

Watchdog groups and other transparency advocates say such openness is important to help guard against abuse and to allow for outside oversight. They also say retiree pensions should be public — especially those at the high end — because the system is government-funded.

"When that amount of money is being spent, it’s important for the public to know who those people are," said David Greene, a San Francisco attorney whose firm represents the First Amendment Coalition, an open-government advocate in California. "Taxpayers have an interest in learning how government money is being spent."

Hawaii has long considered information about individual ERS pensioners private, and the agency still relies on a 1990 Office of Information Practices opinion that concluded that retirement amounts are confidential.

The opinion cited several reasons, including that the release of a retiree’s pension amount would be an unwarranted invasion of privacy. It also said that the significant public interest in the fiscal operation of the ERS could be satisfied through the disclosure of aggregate data about benefit payments.

Linda Saito, who retired in 2007 after 35 years with the Board of Water Supply, said she believes her ERS pension amount should be kept confidential.

"I guess, for me, I’m a private person," Saito said. If pension data were made public, she fears the information could fall into the hands of someone who would misuse it.

"It’s hard to trust people nowadays," Saito said.

The ERS pays out hundreds of millions of dollars annually in benefits. In fiscal 2011, for instance, nearly $1 billion was paid.

Although the agency does not release data on individual pensioners — other than to verify that someone is receiving a pension — it is able to provide aggregate statistics, such as how many retirees get annual benefits of more than $100,000 each.

Three of those 59 collect more than $125,000 but less than $150,000, according to the ERS statistics, obtained by the Star-Advertiser through a public-records request. No one in the system collects a pension topping $150,000.

The agency also was able to disclose limited statistics about state and county retirees whose pension benefits exceeded their base pay. At least 20 who retired in 2008 and 2009 fit that category, according to the ERS.

The statistics provided to the Star-Advertiser showed that 3,161 retirees were receiving annual pensions of $50,000 or more as of Jan. 31, a nearly 20 percent increase from 10 months earlier.

The increase reflected a general trend toward higher pensions throughout much of the system over the past year.

ERS Administrator Wes Machida said the trend is anticipated to continue. "It is a trend that we are concerned about given the growing pension and unfunded liabilities," he said in a written statement.

The system’s unfunded liability as of June was more than $8 billion.

Because the newspaper was unable to obtain the names of the 59 retirees collecting six-figure pensions, it could not determine whether any of them also were so-called double dippers — those who get a state pension while drawing a regular paycheck with the state or county.

"I’m stunned that in the year 2012 this kind of information is not available," said Edward Zelinsky, a law professor and pension expert at the Cardozo School of Law in New York. "This is the public’s business."

Hawaii’s confidentiality policy, however, is similar to how pension systems in the majority of states treat retiree identities and benefit amounts, according to Sujit CanagaRetna, senior fiscal analyst with the Council of State Governments’ southern region in Atlanta.

"Hawaii definitely is not an outlier in that sense at all," CanagaRetna said.

In an August 2010 survey of public pension systems in nearly 30 states, more than half considered some or all details of individual retirees’ data confidential, according to the National Association of State Retirement Administrators survey.

The organization found that such data are considered public in pensions systems in about a dozen states, including two in which recent court decisions forced disclosure to comply with open-records laws. Several other states not covered by the NASRA survey also treat such information as public, according to newspaper articles.

For Machida, Hawaii’s retirement system administrator, the issue of what to release and what not to is guided by one thing. "The ERS is following the law regarding disclosure of pension information," he said.