Pub. 5 2016 Issue 1

January 2016 25 l e a d i n g a d v o c a t e f o r t h e b a n k i n g i n d u s t r y i n k a n s a s ABA Government Relations Summit 2016 March 14-16, 2016 Washington, DC Join ABA and bankers from across the U.S. for the 2016 ABA Government Relations Summit, in Washington, DC. Be a voice of influence during this critical election year, and unite with more than a thousand industry colleagues to help bring your hometown perspective to Capitol Hill. Open to ABA members and non-members. aba.com/Summit register at SBA Print ad 8.5 x 5.5 4-color.indd 1 12/7/15 4:44 PM and post-purchase documentation. This process needs to include reviewing risks associated with unfunded pension liabilities. The recommended credit metrics listed above and other information about unfunded pension liabilities can be found by reading the footnotes to the municipality’s financial statements. Baker has been manually collecting this data for our clients for over 3 years, and we now have pension data for about 80% of the over 20,000 municipal bond issuers and 130,000 cusips in our database. Below is an example of the pension specific portion of The Baker Group’s Credit Criterion Check tool for post-purchase monitoring. As the availability of pension data becomes more accessible, this tool will help identify municipalities with pension plans that don’t meet our preferred benchmarks. Dana Sparkman is a municipal analyst in The Baker Group’s financial strategies group. She manages a municipal credit database that covers more than 100,000 municipal bonds, providing clients with specific credit metrics essen- tial in assessing municipal credit. Dana earned a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Central Oklahoma. Contact: 405-415-7223, dana@ gobaker.com.