Pension payout by mistake?

poseidon1

neil7462 said:

Thank you all for your comments very much appreciated.
Just to add the pension company is Sopre Steria Capita.
When I googled the company they have had a data breach in 2023, so not sure if this has anything to do with this.
 I am going to make sure she doesn't do anything before everything is checked and verified.
I personally think this is a scam, and will need advice how to report this in the future
many thanks

See below an interesting mea culpa faqs  from Capita regarding the 2023 data breach, the extent members and ex members may have been affected and the nature of the data stolen in the breach (spoiler alert, potentially every detail one can think of!).


https://www.ssrbs.co.uk/~/media/document-libraries/steriapensions/2023/capita_cyber_incident_faq_v2.pdf?la=en&hash=D9B4A0241E2137FCD3C4287F1D431CEE687A34B8

neil7462

I have just received an email from Sopra Steria and the letter is genuine and that their specialist team will be in touch regarding the overpayment, she has received in total £21033.30 gross and paid £4206.40 in income tax, so the net amount is £16826.90. Do you think they will ask for it all back, it just seems such an error on their part.

Marcon

neil7462 said:

I have just received an email from Sopra Steria and the letter is genuine and that their specialist team will be in touch regarding the overpayment, she has received in total £21033.30 gross and paid £4206.40 in income tax, so the net amount is £16826.90. Do you think they will ask for it all back, it just seems such an error on their part.

I'm afraid the answer is yes - she has never had any entitlement to the money.

I'd expect them to start by asking for the whole amount to be refunded, but it's possible the amount would be reduced by anything they might expect the Pensions Ombudsman to award for 'distress, disappointment and inconvenience'.  That is likely to be around a thousand pounds, or possibly a bit more, at best.

Do the trustees know about this?

PensionsStuff

I've worked with the Trustee side of pensions for quite a while now so I thought this was interesting (in a bad way) and thought I'd offer my insight.

I've seen this happen a few times unfortunately, as someone said its just down to bad administration, missing the right checks, being over worked, under trained, whatever the excuse is it happened.  I'd guess they wanted to find a member who was entitled to a pension, did a tracing exercise, found someone with the same name and DOB, found out he was deceased and then found the spouse and just never did any actual checks to verify anything. 

When I've seen it happen to a member themselves, the Trustees tend to be less forgiving, how do you not recognise you never worked for this company, retirement packs likely say your service dates and you didnt query it etc. Only ever seen it once where went straight to a spouse, in that instance (after some back and forth) agreed to write off the overpayment (read - the Trustee got the admin company to cover it, which doesnt always happen).

I may not normally have all the sympathy in the world for pension mistakes and people wanting to keep money they aren't entitled to, but this is one area I certainly am.

I'd want for further contact, complain and explain they had no way to know , you should have done proper checks, the money has been spent, the administration company should foot the bill for their non existent checks and not you, continue through their complaints process and continue to the Ombudsman and ultimately then see what happens. If that's all exhausted, they are well within their right to request to pay it back over a long period (a typically example used is to pay it back over the same length of time that was overpaid in the first place)

Marcon

neil7462 said:

Not sure if this is a scam or true.
I assisted a person who had lost her husband with a pension pay-out that she was unaware of and she successfully received it last year. 

OP - exactly how did you assist her?  I presume that this was a company for whom her late husband had actually worked?

As you've noticed, I've banged on about ensuring the trustees themselves know about this, with a singular lack of response from you on the point. It's important, because they may choose to put pressure on the administrators to cover some of the cost, which in turn would reduce the amount your friend would have to repay.

neil7462

She didn't know anything about this alleged pension her husband had, but was sent lots of letters with an application form to fill out. She even moved house 2 years ago and the same letter was being sent. The information we sent to them was her husbands national insurance number and hers.  A copy of her passport, driving license and marriage certificate. I was helping her as a work colleague as she wasn't very confident with forms and doing things online. 

Aylesbury_Duck

neil7462 said:

She didn't know anything about this alleged pension her husband had, but was sent lots of letters with an application form to fill out. She even moved house 2 years ago and the same letter was being sent. The information we sent to them was her husbands national insurance number and hers.  A copy of her passport, driving license and marriage certificate. I was helping her as a work colleague as she wasn't very confident with forms and doing things online. 

That makes it even more of a mess-up. While a name and DOB coincidence is plausible if unlikely, they were given two unique NI numbers and still managed to mess it up!