Defined contribution arrangements
When less is not necessarily more

25 July 2019 - Caroline Overton
The perennial question of how much information should be given to members pops up to vex employers and trustees from time to time. Generally, it is possible for trustees and employers to steer a careful course between complying with statutory disclosure obligations and avoiding the pitfalls of providing tax or financial advice. This month, however, › Read More
Compensation for distress and inconvenience – where are we now?

19 March 2019 - Amy Priestley
Pension schemes are complex and even the best-run schemes have to deal with complaints. When advising on complaints being considered under a scheme’s internal dispute resolution procedure (IDRP), I’m often asked ‘should we offer compensation?’ and, if so, ‘how much?’. › Read More
Hope for scam victims; concern for pension schemes?

07 August 2018 - Helen Powell
A new pension liberation case has hit the headlines, after the Pensions Ombudsman (TPO) found that the authority managing the Police Pension Scheme could not rely on a statutory discharge following a transfer, because it had failed to perform adequate scam checks on the proposed receiving scheme and failed to give the member the Regulator’s › Read More
Windrush, GDPR and pension schemes: what should you do about historic data?

19 April 2018 - Helen Powell
Pension schemes have a long lifecycle. They need personal data to put pensions into payment decades after a member first joined the scheme and may need to deal with claims about calculation errors decades after that. Schemes with a complex history of mergers and bulk transfers-in may have significant quantities of legacy data. Any scheme › Read More

23 February 2018 - Nadia Karavias
The Pensions Regulator has imposed fines on the trustees of Pakistan International Airlines’ pension scheme (£500 each for failure to provide audited accounts for two years), and on the trustees of six schemes for failure to comply with the content requirements of the Chair’s statement. Potential fines are a frequent concern for trustees: who pays › Read More