It seems the $16,000 a month he currently receives just isn’t enough.

Jon Lender of the Courant reports.

Six-Figure State University Retiree Wants More

The retired chancellor of the Connecticut State University System, David G. Carter, is receiving a lifetime pension of nearly $200,000 a year — but he has filed an appeal saying that he deserves $367,000 annually.

“Dr. Carter’s entitlements have been wildly miscalculated by the State,” Carter’s lawyer, Daniel N. Mara, said last month in a letter to the State Retirement Commission. “All of the State’s calculations are wrong.”

Mara also made his case in an oral presentation to the commission on Nov. 21, but the panel has not yet given its answer. “We’re awaiting their response,” Mara said last week. He added that the case could conceivably end up in court someday if Carter doesn’t receive a satisfactory result, but “no decision been made, and I would have to discuss it with my client.”

At his current pension level — $16,664 a month, according to the state Office of the Comptroller — Carter ranks as the 11th-highest recipient in the state pension system. But Mara said that before his client retired March 1, 2011, Carter had been told by the human resources manager for the state university system that his pension would be calculated according to the standard formula that uses a multiplier involving years of service and the average of an employee’s salary in his or her three highest-earning years.

For Carter, that average was $419,634, and, with the multiplier of .875, it came out to $367,179, Mara wrote.

However, the comptroller’s office retirement division in recent years has taken steps to place a cap on pensions of the state’s elite officials when they retire, because in 2010 the office belatedly woke up to its obligations under Internal Revenue Service rules. Under Section 415 of the federal Internal Revenue Code, the IRS grants significant tax benefits to pension plans – such as allowing exemptions on employees’ annual contributions – but in granting such benefits, the IRS also insists that the pension plan abide by its limits on amounts.