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Tracing Occupational Pensions
Hi, Im hoping somebody might be able to help.
I have a client who recently ended employment, and has tried to make a claim for Pension Credit. As part of the application process, the Pensions Service look to see if you have any pensions etc, through their links with other organisations.
My client has several small pensions from different employers, but the Pensions Service say that the cannot see details of all of them, and until they have been traced, they cannot allow a claim for Pension Credit.
Client has written off to the Pension providers to get details of them, but so far has had no response..
It seems like it is just a waiting game at the minute, but wondered if there was anything that anybody could recommend to speed the process up as it is delaying entitlement.
Thanks for that. I will give it a try.
I had a client in exactly this position - she tried to claim Pension Credit and was told that they could tell by their system that she had some private pensions and until she claimed those they would not award Pension Credit.
I then helped the client complete the forms for Pension Tracing (client had not worked for 35 years but had done a few part time jobs when she was younger and before she married) and duly sent these off.
Some came back that they could not trace any record of a pension and some came back they couldn’t find the company concerned so loads more time spent with client trying to remember where they were based and seeing if they had changed names etc and sending this info back to Pension Tracing.
In the end all came back with no record of pension (which we suspected) but I rung Pension Credit to ask what evidence they had that the client had a pension - they told me they had no evidence but that they knew from her NI records that she had worked in the past and just wanted her to check?!?!?
Pension Credit claim was then put in payment - we sent no proof that we had tried to locate the private pensions so not sure if they asked Pension Tracing or if they just took our word for it?
It’s an interesting one this.
In the past our targeted take-up with older people has thrown up overpayments of PC for people who had undeclared OPs they didn’t think of as income so this service has backfired. However, there does seem to be a trend towards “do this or else we won’t do this”. Had it recently with HB declining to make an award following a lowering of child care costs until the claimant had notified Tax Credits and produced a revised decision, laughably but inevitably within 4 weeks. Sure enough they shut the claim down until I challenged both the 4 weeks and the initial refusal. If you have enough information to make a decision then you have to make a decision, especially where you can see an entitlement. The PC scenario described above is one we’ve come across repeatedly too.