Rather than make you wait until this Thursday, we decided to immediately publish Ralph Cipriano's story on the city's long-awaited Deferred Retirement Option Plan (DROP) report — which will supposedly be released sometime this week. If you recall, Cipriano wrote a cover story in April about the program that has needlessly cost the city $1 billion.

In this week's piece, he writes about the failings of the city-commissioned report on DROP by Boston College:

The contract between the city and Boston College was supposed to go into effect May 12, 2009, but because of disagreements over several key issues, the contract did not get signed until Dec. 18. Initially, city officials wanted Boston College to be liable for gross negligence or willful misconduct up to $1 million, but wound up settling for a liability cap of $500,000. The college professors doing the study also sought performance evaluations from the city of Philadelphia employees — such as satisfactory and superior — so they could study DROP's effect on each category of worker, but the city was unable to provide such records.

According to a "scope of services" document, Boston College said it needed those records because, "We seek to understand the human behavior behind the decisions individuals make so that we can focus on solutions that work in practice, not just in theory. ... Once we have identified who is actually working longer due to the DROP, we can then analyze whether or not the program is achieving its goal of retaining highly valued employees."

Read the rest of the article here.

Ralph Cipriano on the city’s long-awaited DROP report