We sometimes have to adjust the value of your pension savings to put right something that’s gone wrong because of an administrative error.
Adjustments to the value of your investments
If there’s a delay in processing your contributions, we can’t invest them on the date we should. 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 data – 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 them on the right date. Their value could be lower or higher. As a result, your benefit statement may show an adjustment that is a refund or a debit.
How do you work out adjustments to investments?
After getting contributions and payroll data from your employer, we look at all your contributions 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 your contributions and your employer’s contributions 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 do you 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 your first contribution.)
These are the checks we make.
- Whether you’re an active member (paying contributions) or a deferred member (you’ve stopped paying contributions, but your pension savings are still in the Scheme).
- Whether we’ve applied the charges at the right time – for example, when you joined the Scheme.
- We’ve also made sure that you’ve only been charged once, even if you have more than one contract and more than one lot of pension savings in the Scheme (with the same or different employers).
If you’ve paid higher charges than you should have, the adjustment on your statement shows the refund we’ve added to your 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 account. If you have several employment contracts, we may have debited more than one account if there wasn’t enough in a single account.
I disagree with the amount being refunded or debited, what can I do?
If you think we’ve got something wrong, please let us know. We’ll do our best to put things right. You can contact us online through our member contact form or call us on 0330 100 3334 (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm). 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.