Advice on Professional Added Years

D

DingDing

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I am looking for advice on my application for professional added years.

I have two positions, a temporary position and a higher permenant position I got a couple of years later.

I am looking for professional advice on filling in the required paperwork.

Has anyone any recommendations for a consultant / company who provides this service.

Many thanks and Happy New Year.
 
It's quite difficult to find information on PAY and how they are calculated. A recently retired colleague with 30 years PS service at age 65 applying for PFAs was advised by their HR department to only apply for 9 years instead of 10 because they had a previous pension from another employment. Please update us with the outcome of your application. If you could provide the number of years service upon retirement and the number of PFAs applied for versus awarded, that you be very useful. Good luck.
 
Would your Union or Association not be in a position to provide assistance? I see from your post on Boards that you're working in the academic area where, I would imagine, applying for PAY would arise on a regular basis.
 
Marsupial said:
Would your Union or Association not be in a position to provide assistance? I see from your post on Boards that you're working in the academic area where, I would imagine, applying for PAY would arise on a regular basis.
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Doing a pre retirement course with the union in a couple of weeks. To be honest I found them fairly poor. I was trying to access the
critical illness protocol a couple of years ago and they took HRs side even though there were serious errors in process, procedures and the letter declining it.
 
poorrelative said:
It's quite difficult to find information on PAY and how they are calculated. A recently retired colleague with 30 years PS service at age 65 applying for PFAs was advised by their HR department to only apply for 9 years instead of 10 because they had a previous pension from another employment. Please update us with the outcome of your application. If you could provide the number of years service upon retirement and the number of PFAs applied for versus awarded, that you be very useful. Good luck.
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Will do. Ill give all the details as I go along here.
 
DingDing said:
Doing a pre retirement course with the union in a couple of weeks. To be honest I found them fairly poor. I was trying to access the
critical illness protocol a couple of years ago and they took HRs side even though there were serious errors in process, procedures and the letter declining it.
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That's a pity, but to be honest, I'm not all that surprised. (A medical friend of mine got assistance from the IHCA when applying for PAY and found them both helpful and, more importantly, competent!) Good luck with your search.
 
Marsupial said:
That's a pity, but to be honest, I'm not all that surprised. (A medical friend of mine got assistance from the IHCA when applying for PAY and found them both helpful and, more importantly, competent!) Good luck with your search.
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Thanks, I might get some leads at the pre-retirement course. I had a very good session organised by my employer, however that company don't do consultancy work for individuals, just advise / train corporate clients.

A couple of things I learned from the training.

1. If you joined the PS on a temporary basis and then got a permenant role later, you can apply on the basis of either employment. (This is part of my dilemma)
2. They take other pensions into account and the form requires a lot of information in regard to this.
3. The number of candidates interviewed for the role counts in deciding the service. If there is only one candidate, then their experience accounts as the required experience. (Again, I think I was the only candidate who interviewed, an IT role just before Y2K when the PS was not an attractive proposition for and IT professional.)
4. It is the mandatory requirements for your job, not similar jobs, so I need to go back to the original job advertisements and job specifications.

These make it a very complicated application, particularly when I have a choice of 2 roles to apply for the added years for. Anyway, into HR after Christmas to look for my HR file and the job applications and try to make sense of it.

I could be entitled to 0, 1 or 8 years, depending on the interpretation. So it is worth putting the effort into it.
 
Just an update on this.

I got the form from work, and I was working through it last weekend. The first part is to establish the entitlement and the second part is to abate work against the requirements. What I learned was:-

The Professional Added years is based on either your first role, and if it was temporary, you can select your first permeant role if this is more favourable.

There are differences depending on when you started, there are 3 schemes.

you will need the job description / job booklet and it is the essential criteria, Educational Qualifications and experience. In my case the requirement was A Honours Degree, a Masters and 3 years qualifications. This gave 19 + (4 + 2) + 3 - 25 = 3 Added years.

The second section looked at abatements to this, essentially your pension history and service counted on your pension scheme, i.e. transferred service, purchased service and earned service.

For our organisation much of the information for the second section was in the Pensions Module of the CORE system.
 
A further update.

The Department of education will only take an application within 6 months of a "Confirmed" retirement date. The employer in the forms is not the IoT / TU where I have worked for over 20 years, its the department, so when they talk about the employer approval / decisions these rest with the department.

It is a big decision to retire and to be able to confirm it six months out is a big step. The form can of course be submitted closer to retirement but I think it takes at least 3-4 months to process.

The institutions pension department assessed the PAY as 3 years. Thats 19 + (4+2) +3 -25 4 years degree, 2 years masters and 3 years post qualification experience. The form hasn't been sent to the department yet as I have yet to confirm my retirement date.

And then the abatement starts. :)

I also found out that the supplementary pension amount is calculated by my institutions pension and payroll department and it is recalculated anytime there is a change in the pay of the grade, or the SW / Pension rates.

A further complication is that if your Professional added years post was with another organisation and you transferred in the service, it could be possible to use this as the PAY post. Can happen when a Public Servant transfers into the education sector for example from another public sector area. This would probably give the PAY applicant the choice of the best of first or first permanent in their current organisation and first or first permanent in the PS. This would be interesting as the HR files if a lot of time has passed may no longer exist in the first organisation with the detail required to make a PAY.
 
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DingDing said:
A further update.

The Department of education will only take an application within 6 months of a "Confirmed" retirement date. The employer in the forms is not the IoT / TU where I have worked for over 20 years, its the department, so when they talk about the employer approval / decisions these rest with the department.

It is a big decision to retire and to be able to confirm it six months out is a big step. The form can of course be submitted closer to retirement but I think it takes at least 3-4 months to process.

The institutions pension department assessed the PAY as 3 years. Thats 19 + (4+2) +3 -25 4 years degree, 2 years masters and 3 years post qualification experience. The form hasn't been sent to the department yet as I have yet to confirm my retirement date.

And then the abatement starts. :)

I also found out that the supplementary pension amount is calculated by my institutions pension and payroll department and it is recalculated anytime there is a change in the pay of the grade, or the SW / Pension rates.

A further complication is that if your Professional added years post was with another organisation and you transferred in the service, it could be possible to use this as the PAY post. Can happen when a Public Servant transfers into the education sector for example from another public sector area. This would probably give the PAY applicant the choice of the best of first or first permanent in their current organisation and first or first permanent in the PS. This would be interesting as the HR files if a lot of time has passed may no longer exist in the first organisation with the detail required to make a PAY.
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Hi Ding Dong
I myself am on a Supplementary Pension and have noticed that my Supplementary has not increased since retirement 2 yrs ago , even though the pay of the grade has increased with national wage agreements plus the rates of COAP contributory old age pension has increased, i see where you said you found out about this recalculation, can you say what departments pension section you found out from please?
Thank you
 
HI Stoves1

It is the local pensions administrator in my organisation. They said that the periodically recalculate the supplementary pension for retired staff, generally when there is a change in SW or a change in scales, or indeed a change in the individuals circumstances.

They did say that there are not a lot of A stamp colleagues retired yet and claiming supplementary pension. There was a hiring freeze in my organisation for most of the 90's and indeed early 2000's so most of the retirees up to now have been D stamp.
 
Thank you Ding Dong

I have sent an email to my pensions section ie "Garda pensions" along with supporting government documentation looking for my Supplementary to be recalculated, On a post here called "Post 1995 Supplementary pension query" there were some helpful people who put up pension links etc, rking regards
 
stoves1 said:
Thank you Ding Dong

I have sent an email to my pensions section ie "Garda pensions" along with supporting government documentation looking for my Supplementary to be recalculated, On a post here called "Post 1995 Supplementary pension query" there were some helpful people who put up pension links etc, rking regards
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Hi stoves1,
I am in the same position . I retired Nov 2021on a post '95 pension. I am also a member of GSRMA and highlighted this issue with them . Its very hard to get anything solid on our situation even from the pension section .They sent off my query to DPERS, about the supplimentary pension not rising in line with the garda side of my pension. The reply they sent me was not positive. Have you had any luck with the pensions section?
 
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