SERPS Compensation?

SusansHusband

Browsing the internet I have come across a link to a company offering to see if I can claim compensation if I ever contracted out of SERPS (which I did for quite a while). Anyone know if this is a viable option or is it a scam? I just took my financial advisors advice at the time so I don't know whether I got a good deal or a bad deal!

magpiecottage

It is most unlikely that you can unless you can show that you were over about 45 at the time or that you earned less than about £10,000 and no realistic prospect of earning more than that, in real terms.

In reality extremely few cases are upheld. You also risk finding yourself in trouble if you make a statement you know to be untrue and the firm actually being able to prove that you knew it was untrue.

dunstonh

Browsing the internet I have come across a link to a company offering to see if I can claim compensation if I ever contracted out of SERPS (which I did for quite a while). Anyone know if this is a viable option or is it a scam? I just took my financial advisors advice at the time so I don't know whether I got a good deal or a bad deal!

The FSA did a review of contracting out of SERPS and found a potential failure rate of around 1.5%. So, 98.5% of people were not mis-sold. The FSA issued a flow chart to see if you were possibly mis-sold. It was very simple and effectively led down the route that if you were under age 45 at the time of contracting out then you were not mis-sold.

There was a period when a few claims companies operated on this basis but they pulled out after the FSA review. There are a couple of companies left but I am not at all impressed with them as it appears they do the mis-sale complaint for free generating a template complaint letter but then tell you that you should transfer the pension to someone else. That generates them a commission (typically around 5% of the value).

So, if the company you are looking at reads that it does the complaint for free but will also review the pension then be on guard. They make their money from the pension transfer. Not the rare case where you may be in the 1.5%.

Personally, I think this method of getting business for themselves is dodgy as it involves generating a complaint against a firm who statistically is likely to have done no wrong (and fraudulent complaints generate costs and bad feeling if its a small local firm). However, the generation of the complaint is purely used as an attempt to earn money in another area.