Adjustments to the value of investments
If there’s a delay in processing contributions from you and the member, the money won’t be invested on the date it should have been. So investment values could be lower or higher than they would have been without the delay.
Delays are usually caused by us receiving incomplete or missing payroll information – such as a missing date of birth or National Insurance number.
We adjust the investments to put them back to what they would have been if we’d been able to invest the money on the right date. Their value could be lower or higher. So the adjustment on the benefit statement could be a refund or a debit.
To do this, we’ll ask you for payroll information. Then we’ll look at the member’s payments to see if any of them were invested more than 22 days later than the date they should have been.
The investment funds are divided into equal-value units. The weekly price of each unit changes depending on the value of the investments in each fund.
We use the payments from you and the member to buy these units. The number of units we can buy depends on the unit price at the date we buy them. When unit prices go down, each contribution buys more units. When unit prices go up, each contribution buys fewer units.
We adjust the value of the pension savings using the price we would have paid for the investment units if we’d bought them within the 22-day period.
- If the unit price should have been higher, the adjustment will be a debit.
- If the unit price should have been lower, the adjustment will be a refund.
Adjustments to charges
If we’ve found there’s an error in the charges the member has paid, we’ll make an adjustment to put this right. This can be a refund or a debit.
We check to see if the right amount was taken from the member’s now:pensions account to cover the charges up to and including 31 March. These are the checks we make.
- Whether the member is still paying in to their pension savings, or they’ve stopped paying in but still have now:pensions savings.
- Whether we’ve taken the charges at the right time – for example, when the member joined now:pensions.
- We also make sure they’re only charged once, even if they have more than one contract and more than one lot of now:pension savings, with you or another workplace.
If the member has paid higher charges than they should have, the adjustment shows the refund we’ve added to the now:pensions account.
If the member has paid lower charges than they should have, the adjustment shows the debit we’ve taken from the now:pensions account.
