Computershare!!

binntonic

Hi, My 1st post so I hope I get this right. My wife was saving a regular amount each month with her works sharesave scheme. She left her employment about halfway through. After an initial period she got in touch with sharesave who were the brokers in this case. She asked what her options were and one option she was told was that she could continue saving and have the benefits at the end of the 36 month period. We were expecting just over £4k but sharesave says that we could only have our money back (£2.8k)that we had paid in as the person that gave my wife the information had given her incorrct information. They have accepted this after listening to the phone call. They sent us a cheque for £25 as a goodwill gesture( a little bit less than the £1.2K extra we had hoped for) We contacted the FCA who said there wasn't anything they could do as Sharesave brokerage infomation wasn't regulated by them. My question is does anyone else have experience of this or sharesave not honouring their employees mis-information? Is there any more avenues we could try? We haven't closed the account yet as we didn't want to jepodise any further progress in gettinfg what were thought we were entitled to. Any advice would be gratefully received. Many thanks Phil

chris_m

Sharesave schemes do vary but some aspects are set by HMRC rules, some by the company concerned. In general (and I think this is an HMRC one) you can only take the benefits (i.e. shares) if you complete the savings term or leave the company under certain circumstances, the main ones being retirement or a redundancy scheme. Whether you can get the benefits under these special situations also depends upon how long you have been saving, IIRC for redundancy my ex-company rules (possibly also HMRC) required that you'd been saving for more than 2 years.
If you don't meet the criteria you can only get your money back, in that case sometimes you can continue to save but you still won't get the benefits.
If your wife hasn't met the HMRC requirements than I doubt the company will be allowed to do anything even if they wanted, hence the goodwill payment.

binntonic

Many thanks for taking the time to reply Chris

Playing_with_Fire_2

You could try going back to them and asking for a higher goodwill payment - perhaps calculate the interest you would have earned if you had taken the money and put it in a high interest account?

Agreed that they can't do what they said they would due to HMRC rules.