Pension transfer problem - advice please

dunstonh

Infidelus wrote: »

Thanks. If I'm reading that right, then it's the other company that are being the pain as NEST are the receiving pension provider and have therefore sent their requirements form that the other company are refusing to complete.

Or am I misunderstanding?

No its NEST that are being a pain for not accepting the information they need on anything other than their own form. As I said, providers have not been filling in discharge forms for over a decade. Many don't even use discharge forms any more and use the automated transfer system called OPTIONS.

All the providers need the same information when doing a transfer. So, they all automatically provide that information in a single document (when paper) or via the options system (when electronic). The process is designed to speed up the transfers and has worked very well in that respect. Transfers now take under a week. It used to be 4-13 weeks on typically.

NEST are disregarding that information supplied, even though its the same information they need, and are asking for a staff member at the transferring firm to supply them the exact same information in handwriting rather than printed form.

Infidelus

OK, thanks for the fuller explanation.

Not sure what I can do at the moment if neither of them are willing to budge, but I've written to the Pensions Advisory Service in the meantime to complain.

woolly_wombat

Infidelus wrote: »

OK, thanks for the fuller explanation.

Not sure what I can do at the moment if neither of them are willing to budge, but I've written to the Pensions Advisory Service in the meantime to complain.

You could do nothing.

mgdavid

woolly_wombat wrote: »

You could do nothing.

how exactly does that help the OP achieve his pension transfer?

woolly_wombat

mgdavid wrote: »

how exactly does that help the OP achieve his pension transfer?

I would be wary of NEST, for reasons previously outlined:

jamesd wrote: »

Just be happy that this has prevented you from putting more money into NEST, where it's currently locked in until you're 55, with no ability to transfer out until then.

xylophone

OP, have you read post 6?

Infidelus

wooly_wombat: I'm not worried about not being able to transfer it out until I'm 55. It's not a huge amount of time to wait

xylophone: Yes, checked out the link thanks. Not sure it's worth the setup cost and annual fee for the small amount involved.

Infidelus

Just a quick update on this.

After raising a formal complaint with Nest and threatening both companies with legal action (assuming there was any I could actually have taken) if they both continued to refuse to complete the other's forms, I've now had responses from both the previous scheme and Nest. The previous employer has now advised that they've filled in Nest's form and what follows is a response to my complaint to Nest. It's a waffly letter, so I've just pasted the appropriate bits in case somebody else runs into this problem in the future.

Section 1 is designed to be completed by the member so we can make sure we have their correct details and have confirmation that the member wishes to proceed with a transfer.
Section 2 is designed to be completed by the scheme releasing the transfer, known as the ceding scheme, and confirms that the transfer is coming from a legitimate source and meets our criteria. The form must be signed by a representative of the ceding scheme and we can’t proceed with a transfer in without this part of the form.

In Section 1, we also included our scheme declaration and HMRC certificate for you to send to the ceding scheme. In our scheme declaration, we state that it is not our policy to complete other company’s transfer forms and this is because, at the point of providing our forms, we don’t know if we can accept the transfer. We provide as much information as we can to help the ceding scheme assess if they can make the transfer to us. Once we have confirmation that the previous pension meets our requirements, we will complete forms from the ceding scheme as we understand that this will help the member.

We received a letter from your previous pension provider, [previous employer], on 29 February and they asked us to complete their receiving scheme forms. At this point, we still needed Sections 1 and 2 of our forms to be returned. This meant we didn’t know if we could accept the transfer so we sent another copy of our forms to you to pass to the ceding scheme and also wrote to [previous employer] to explain the situation.

We received the completed Sections 1 and 2 on 7 April and the information from [previous employer] confirmed that we could accept your transfer. We wrote to them
on 12 April and provided our bank account details for [previous employer] to make the transfer.

As part of our investigation into your complaint, we’ve also contacted [previous employer] directly to make sure they have everything they need and have been told they’re planning to make the transfer on 26 April 2016. We’ll let you know once we receive the payment.

It's annoying that it took this much effort to actually get Nest and my previous employer scheme to actually do anything, but it looks like it may all be sorted now.

Thanks for all the responses.

dunstonh

Hopefully, NEST will learn over time and avoid that in future with others.

Thanks for update.

Infidelus

.... and the saga continues.

Just when I thought it was over, I've just received an email from my previous scheme saying they're still waiting for Nest to complete their forms. This, after Nest advised they'd directly contacted the previous scheme to confirm everything was in order.

They also asked for a copy of my passport. I can't see why this is required as I've already identified myself with the paperwork that I've completed that they sent to my registered address.

Time to go sit in a corner and count to 10,000 ....