Pat Kenny and Pension boards rep

[Tall Chapy]

Did anybody listen to Pat Kenny radio where he had a representative from the Pension Board. Towards the end what really annoyed me, Pat put forward a few of the listeners question, the main 2 questions, Pat let her off the hook by letting her brush aside the questions.
- She was asked, are people entitled to an annual statement where they have left an employer. Rather than a yes/no. She said that they can chase it up with their previous employer or request an annual statement from the pension provider.
and not staing whether there was a cost involved.

- She was asked can a person with a pension running ask for a more detailed pension statement showing units and valuation in their annual statement. She waffled and said that the valuation is shown in the statement, the unit values are shown in the papers...totally ignoring the original question.

Sorrry about the rant, but it just annoys me so much.
I really believe people should have better pension statements so that they can judge how well the units are doing and whether the provider is doing a decent job.

 

[Brendan Burgess]

Hi Tall Chappy

Anyone who is unhappy with the service of their pension provider, can complain to [broken link removed].

Brendan

 

[Tall Chapy]

Thanks for the info, Brendan.
I think it would just be a general moan rather than any specific problem.
What has bugged me for years is that there is no law in the land stating that an annual statement is a 'right'. It maybe for those currently in a pension but for those who have taken a retirement bond, left there pension with there last employer, until they get a new job..I am sure there are loads of scenarios where people are not entitled to receive a pension statement automatically. Ann Maher on Pat Kenny's show dodged this question by saying they can request a statement and without mentioning whether it would cost them to do so.
My other sore point is Pension statements. For years I have said that pension statements should be more detailed and the typical answer I get is 'sure that's the way pension statement have always been'. Pension statements should give a detailed account of how many units you purchased each month. An annual summary should be give showing how well this years' pension performance did against last year. It should also give a basic guide as to how well each fund did against the average in that type of fund. So that everyone will have a rough idea of how well each fund did. To me this is not asking too much. Most of this would be held in a database and just needs to be printed out each year to everyone.

 

[zag]

I agree with Tall Chappy.

I am a member of a number of pension schemes, and trying to get annual statements out of them is a lot of hassle.

It is also never entirely clear as to whether I am entitled to the statemement or not. Some of the companies say they will only issue them to the trustees and some will issue them directly.

I have also lost track of one of the schemes and it seems impossible to work out where it has gone. The company I worked for had a scheme with one provider, but then the company got taken over and the scheme moved to another provider, but it seems that only some of the members moved to that scheme and some of them got parked somewhere. Then the company got taken over again and everyone in the active scheme got moved again. I got in touch with the administrators of the schemes and nobody could find my records. Since the company had gone through so many take overs I couldn't even work out who to contact in the new company to find out what had happened. It is on my list of things to do to get this sorted out, but since i have about 30 years to go to retirement I'm not in too much of a rush.

Still, I would be a bit upset if I discovered coming up to retirement that one of my pensions had gone AWOL and nobody could tell me where it was and all I had was a statement from 20 years before from a provider which has been through many generations of takeovers relating to a scheme for a company which went bust 19 years ago where all known trustees are dead.

I think the least that is reasonable is a yearly (or maybe every 2 or 3 or 4 years) statement showing the value of the fund, preferably with the monthly activity as outlined by Tall Chappy above.

The information *has* to be held by the pension providers - they must know when units were bought and at what price and so on . . .

z

 

[Guest]

> I am a member of a number of pension schemes, and trying to get annual statements out of them is a lot of hassle. It is also never entirely clear as to whether I am entitled to the statemement or not.

I had the same problem with a paid up (Eagle Star as it happens) occupational scheme. When I queried the lack of automatic (e.g. annual) statements I was informed that this was not a statutory right/obligation and that ES (presumably in common with other pension providers?) don't issue them as a matter of course but only on request. I double checked this against the relevant information on the Pensions Board website and it seems that they are within their rights to do this. So for now I am dependent on manually chasing up valuations online or else explicitly requesting statements when necessary. To be fair to ES, in my experience, they are generally on the ball in terms of administration, dealing with (emailed or other) queries etc. but an automatic annual or even less frequent statement would be nice.... :\