Pension Forecast Confusion

Silvertabby

hyubh wrote: »

Hmm, you are misremembering slightly... if a refund went unclaimed, then I would expect the case to get processed as a frozen refund (status 9 if you were an AXISe'r - other systems use different terminology), at which point a CEP would have been paid. On the member rejoining, the administrator would then reclaim the CEP from HMRC as part of the auto-aggregation process.

Put another way, if an LGPS administrator is currently doing a GMP reconciliation and a frozen refund case appears in the data from HMRC, then someone down the line has made an error, as HMRC should not be showing the period as contracted-out.

DailyDaz - my first thought on reading your 'two years' line was that HMRC have no record of a CEP having been paid, even when it should have been. On the other hand, I agree with Silvertabby that £18 p/w is a non-trivial amount for two years, in fact it seems high to me even if it relates to a pre-88 period when schemes could (and usually did) wait 5 years before granting early leavers a preserved benefit. Your wife definitely needs to track this down.

Partly - apologies. I should have said that we tended to use to use Status 2 (neither frozen nor deferred) as an interim measure until we knew what the member was going to do - refund, transfer to another pension fund or move to another job in the LGPS. The latter was a particular problem for us, as many people changed jobs/posts in our Authority but the 'new starter' details would lag well behing the 'leaver' details. This was even more of a problem during the two periods when the vesting period changed from 3 months to 2 years, and then back to 3 months. If the member didn't respond to the letter offering them the choice of either a refund or a deferred pension, then we would apply the default of deferred pension benefits as that was financially better for them. If we had taken each record straight to Status 9 then the CEPs could have been back and forwards like yo-yos.

missile

You may find like me she gets more than the pension forecast :-)