If there’s a delay in processing payments into your pension savings from you and your workplace, the money won’t be invested on the date it should be. This means your 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.
If this affects you, we’ve adjusted your 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 your benefit statement could be a refund or a debit.
How does now:pensions work out adjustments to investments?
After getting payroll information from your workplace, we look at all your payments to see if any of them have an investment date more than 22 days later than the date they should have been invested.
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 your workplace 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’ve adjusted the value of your 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 price of your units should have been higher, your adjustment will be a debit.
- If the price of your units should have been lower, your adjustment will be a refund.
Adjustments to charges
If we’ve found there’s an error in the charges you’ve paid, we’ll make an adjustment to put this right. This can be a refund or a debit.
How does now:pensions work out adjustments to charges?
We check to see if the right amount was taken from your account to cover the charges up to and including 31 March. (We’ve checked this each month since you first paid in to your pension savings.)
These are the checks we make.
- Whether you’re still paying in to your pension savings, or you’ve stopped paying in but you still have now:pensions savings.
- Whether we’ve taken the charges at the right time – for example, when you joined now:pensions.
- We’ve also made sure you’ve only been charged once, even if you have more than one contract and more than one lot of now:pension savings(with the same workplace or different workplaces).
If you’ve paid higher charges than you should have, the adjustment on your statement shows the refund we’ve added to your now:pensions account. If you have several employment contracts, we added the refund to the account with the largest value.
If you’ve paid lower charges than you should have, the adjustment on your statement shows the debit we’ve taken from your now:pensions account. If you have several employment contracts, we may have debited more than one account if there wasn’t enough in a single account.
What can you do if you disagree with the amount being refunded or debited?
If you think we’ve got something wrong, please contact us. We’ll do our best to put things right. To help us help you faster please tell us your full name, address and National Insurance number whenever you contact us.
If you’re not satisfied after doing this, you can use our formal complaints process. This is a step-by-step process involving our Trustee and The Pensions Ombudsman.
