Sponsors and participants can track how well (or poorly) funded a state public pension is with a new online tool from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Considering that states face an unfunded pension liability shortfall of more than $1 trillion, the question of whether a given state's plan will be able to provide the funds it's promised to workers and retirees looms large in every public employee's future.

Problems such as consistent underfunding, risky investment policies and rising benefit costs are creating more vulnerability than ever before in many public employee plans, making them sitting ducks for economic downturns.

The tool offers access to data from Pew's comprehensive 50-state research on state public pensions, enabling users to track how the fiscal health of state public pensions has changed over the past 15 years and what progress, if any, states have made toward cutting unfunded liabilities.

In addition, users can see how pension funds in each state invest their assets, how much they pay in fees and what their investment returns look like over the last several years.

The database also includes information on state-sponsored retiree health benefits, also known as other post-employment benefits (OPEB).

That information includes OPEB funding levels and asset/liability ratios over the past decade, says Pew.

The Indicators section offers data on how the 50 states and their individual pension and OPEB plans rank on more than 30 measures for funding and investment practices, while the state profiles section includes data for pension and OPEB plans and investment funds in all 50 states dating to 2003.

Using the state comparison section, users can view up to three states side-by-side to see how they performed in any year dating to 2003.

And the U.S. overview section offers a dynamic way to analyze changes in fiscal health and discipline across states and over time; the tool also includes a timeline animation to see how each state's funding behavior has affected plan fiscal health.

The tool will be updated annually as comprehensive data become available.

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