Good governance requires that pension trustees adopt a transfer policy that enables them both to implement straightforward legal transfers on a timely basis and not to make transfer payments where there are suspicious circumstances without at least making rigorous checks.
Trustees may be exposed to complaints by transferring members to The Pensions Ombudsman if they either delay or fail to make ordinary transfers to a UK-registered pension scheme or make an imprudent transfer to a bogus arrangement, and in either case the member suffers loss. It is therefore really important that pension trustees adopt their own transfer policy, or at least have sight of and approve their scheme administrators’ transfer policy.
The Occupational and Personal Pension Schemes (Conditions for Transfer) Regulations 2021 apply to all requests made on or after 30 November 2021 for a transfer payment.
Those regulations are designed to combat pensions scams and although they came into play over three months’ ago, both pensions administrators and trustees are still trying to work out how to respond to them and this is still a current issue we are seeing.
In practice, the regulations mean that pension trustees are now required to obtain prescribed evidence from a transferring member of the member’s employment link with the receiving scheme where a transfer to an occupational pension scheme is requested.
In addition to this, pension trustees must now obtain three forms of documentary evidence…
