Court reporter says a six-year CalPERS gap is now costing her hundreds of thousands in benefits
A California appeals court has revived a court reporter's lawsuit against Humboldt County and three HR employees over a six-year pension enrollment gap.
On May 13, 2026, the Court of Appeal for the First Appellate District ruled that Kay Marie Gibbs can pursue claims that the county failed to enroll her in the state pension system and then lost the records she needed to fix the problem.
Gibbs started as a court reporter for the Humboldt County Superior Court in June 1982. She became eligible for the California Public Employees' Retirement System, known as CalPERS, in December 1983. The county did not enroll her until November 1989. She did not find out until 2019, when she was preparing to retire.
To get the missing six years credited, CalPERS told Gibbs it needed the county to certify her full employment history. The county could not. Gibbs alleges three employees of the county's human resources department – Zachary O'Hanen, Linda Catherine Le, and Kara Fales – lost, destroyed, or failed to preserve, search for, or retrieve the records she needed. In October 2020, the county sent CalPERS what the opinion describes as an incomplete compilation of her pay history. Records were missing for four separate stretches between 1982 and 1989.
Gibbs says she has had to delay her retirement and is losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in retirement benefits.
The trial court dismissed her case. The Court of Appeal reversed, and the reasoning is what HR leaders should read closely.
The court held Gibbs stated a viable claim under Government Code section 815.6, which lets people sue public entities for failing to perform mandatory duties. Two of those duties sit firmly inside the HR function. Labor Code section 1198.5 requires employers to let current and former employees inspect their personnel records and to keep those records for at least three years after employment ends. The Public Employees' Retirement Law requires public agencies that contract with CalPERS to enroll eligible employees in the system. Neither, the court said, is discretionary.
The county argued its retention duty ended on January 1, 2007, three years after a 2004 law converted trial court staff from county employees to court employees. The court was not persuaded. Gibbs's job did not end. She kept doing the same work, so the three-year clock never started.
The negligence ruling is the part likely to land hardest in HR circles. In the unpublished portion of the opinion, the court held the three named HR employees can be sued personally for negligence, with the county vicariously liable for their conduct. The defendants argued they had immunity for discretionary acts. The court rejected that, finding they had no discretion to skip enrolling Gibbs in CalPERS, to neglect her records, or to withhold her full employment history from CalPERS.
For public-sector HR teams in California - and for any employer with statutory recordkeeping and enrollment duties – the message is direct. Pension enrollment and personnel records are mandatory functions, not administrative housekeeping. When they fail, the consequences can run not just to the organization, but to the individuals who handled the work.
The case returns to the Humboldt County Superior Court for further proceedings.
