Yet another Pension Administrator Fiasco

Bostonerimus1

The moral is to give yourself plenty of time to work out any issues. I once thought that a couple of months notice for pensions etc would be enough, but now I think six months is safer and if things go smoothly (as they do for most people) then great. Same goes for things like passports.

xylophone

Worth saying in this instance the fault is 100% on equiniti, the old provider, not mercer.

Would you say that Mercer covered themselves in glory?

I quote

Many felt it was a 'disgrace' BAE's pension scheme and its new administrator Mercer had told pensioners to sort out tax code problems direct with HMRC, causing them further frustration over long waits on its jammed phonelines.

The BAE Systems pension scheme changed its administrator from Equiniti to Mercer on 1 August.

Meanwhile, Mercer has now sold its pension administration business. It provided pension administration services to the BAE pension scheme up to and including 31 December, and Aptia UK took over from 1 January 2024.

Mercer said last week: 'Thank you for bringing this matter to our attention. Mercer does not comment publicly on the detail of individual cases.'

It did not respond to a request for further comment. Equiniti declined to comment.

 Formal complaints and requests to Mercer have not been answered, and service by Mercer has been significantly poorer than by Equiniti, in terms of answering the phone and dealing with administration issues aside from tax codes.

People are at the mercy of utterly  incompetent and indifferent corporations and public bodies (HMRC and DWP have become

 notorious for their disgraceful "service")  and are left feeling frustrated, angry and powerless  in the face of this incompetence

 and indifference.

QrizB

If we're collecting pension scheme fiascos, here's another one:

Retired teacher’s pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/jan/20/retired-teachers-pension-stopped-as-provider-refuses-to-believe-she-is-not-dead

Is anyone surprised that it's Capita?

Bostonerimus1

QrizB said:

If we're collecting pension scheme fiascos, here's another one:

Retired teacher’s pension stopped as provider refuses to believe she is not dead

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/jan/20/retired-teachers-pension-stopped-as-provider-refuses-to-believe-she-is-not-dead

Is anyone surprised that it's Capita?

Computer says "No".

xylophone

Is anyone surprised that it's Capita?

All as bad as each other?

MarkCarnage

I am really surprised that a scheme is transferring to Mercer..

However, the problems are increasingly systemic as pensions admin became an outsourced and commoditised product at low cost just at the time it needed not to be, when the impacts of pension freedoms kicked in, with large increases in transfer value requests, plus an increase in DB scheme members retiring. Data quality issues continue to surface too. 
In most cases once you've actually got to pension in payment stage it's fine, but BAE seems to be an exception! One wonders what due diligence and project management of handover was like here. It's a big decision to change administrator, and one that needs to be planned. 

xylophone

I am really surprised that a scheme is transferring to Mercer.
It seems only have been with Mercer for a few months before Mercer's pension business was bought by Aptia.

Three administrators in well under a year.... now that's going it!

MarkCarnage

Aptia is ex JLT people and their business was bought by Mercer a few years back. 

I meant in my comment that in my experience schemes have been/are considering transferring away from Mercer.

The bigger issue as I noted is that the administration model isn't really structured to take account of many of the complexities of the post pensions freedom landscape....there are loads of benefits that are quite idiosyncratic in terms of rules etc, with lots of small differences making it pretty hard to automate, and that's before getting into the data issues....which are often not the fault of the administrator. If you looked below the bonnet, you will find that there are lots of errors, mainly small/trivial in pensions calculations. 

LHW99

Just how far has the Horizon software got?

Pat38493

MarkCarnage said:

Aptia is ex JLT people and their business was bought by Mercer a few years back. 

I meant in my comment that in my experience schemes have been/are considering transferring away from Mercer.

The bigger issue as I noted is that the administration model isn't really structured to take account of many of the complexities of the post pensions freedom landscape....there are loads of benefits that are quite idiosyncratic in terms of rules etc, with lots of small differences making it pretty hard to automate, and that's before getting into the data issues....which are often not the fault of the administrator. If you looked below the bonnet, you will find that there are lots of errors, mainly small/trivial in pensions calculations. 

Yes and the vast majority of members will not have any way to validate or check that the calculations are correct.  This has been discussed on other threads - I think the attitude of the actuaries or admins sometimes is that we little people are far too silly to be given all the details and rules so that we can double check the calculations ourselves.  

As far as I can tell the outcome of this is that a lot of DB pensioners might or might not be getting the correct pension and there is no way to be sure.