Please note that you need to imagine salaries and wages as constituting the entire pie. The reason that you don’t see only a brown pie is that the consultant fees are superimposed on the pie to show their relation to that whole.

Also note that the Indiana Public Employee Retirement Systems and the Indiana Teachers Retirement System merged in 2012. As such, they are shown separately when you select 2009, 2010, or 2011. When you select 2012, however, only the combined fund — called the Indiana Public Retirement System — is displayed.

Finally, while we have data on the aggregate consultant fees for the Michigan Public School Employees’ Retirement System, that fund has declined to provide consultant-specific information for 2009 to 2012. Similarly, the Michigan State Employees Retirement System has declined to provide consultant-specific information for 2012.

All data included in the visualization were collected from the Annual Reports or Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports for the individual funds, except for the total and individual consultant fees paid by the Michigan State Employees’ Retirement System, which were provided by a representative of the fund, and the individual consulting fees paid by the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois in FY 2011, which were reported in a separate disclosure document on the fund’s website.

The data for the Virginia Retirement System include the State Police Officers’ Retirement System, the Virginia Law Officers’ Retirement System, the Judicial Retirement System, and the retirement system for other state employees.

Some public pension funds do not list the salaries and wages paid to their employees separately from the amounts spent on those employees’ benefits. In Remapping Debate’s data visualization, benefits are included in the “Salaries and Wages” categories in the following pension funds: the New York City Employees’ Retirement System and the Teachers’ Retirement System of the State of Illinois.

State fiscal years begin and end in different months. This should be borne in mind when comparing rates of return and other data reported.