The Plumbing and Mechanical Services Industry Pension Scheme has taken steps to trace scheme members to improve its record-keeping, with the address of almost one in every five currently missing.
Record-keeping has been a regulatory focus for the Pensions Regulator, whose most recent annual survey on scheme data showed smaller schemes falling behind larger ones in terms of data quality.
Data types
Common data: Items that are applicable to all schemes, to uniquely identify members.
Conditional data: Dependent on scheme type and structure, needed for effective administration.
Source: The Pensions Regulator
The scheme signed up to Find My Lost Pension, a service that uses national insurance numbers to find members whose schemes hold incomplete information.
Stuart McDonald, pensions officer at the scheme, said: “It’s something we’ve been looking at for a while. We’ve got about 7,000 [members’ records] missing at the moment.” The defined benefit scheme has roughly 37,000 members overall.
The scheme has so far traced only 14 of its lost members. McDonald said it was looking at other options to bolster the search. “We’re in contact with one or two other of the tracing agencies,” he said. “But we’ve not made any decisions as yet.”
The scheme is using guaranteed minimum pension records to ensure its files are up to date. It has previously sent out annual calls to employers, which hold most of the information on members in the multi-employer scheme.
The scheme already uses a tracing service to find lost members as they reach retirement, but is looking to improve records across the board.
“This is a big issue the regulator is looking at… [We’re] just trying to get the records up to date,” McDonald said. Earlier this year, the watchdog called on schemes to improve their standards of record-keeping.
In a statement released at the time, Andrew Warwick-Thompson, executive director for defined contribution at the regulator, said: “It is highly disappointing to see that a proportion of schemes still do not see record-keeping as a priority.
“We will be working with schemes to improve standards but we will take action where problems become apparent to us and report publicly on the outcomes as appropriate.”
Addresses, along with names and national insurance numbers, are a type of common data. In 2010, the regulator set a target for 100 per cent accuracy in common data recorded after June that year and 95 per cent accuracy for data recorded prior to this.
Monica Cope, chief operating officer at data and information security specialist Veratta, said: “Trustees should be well aware of what their common data numbers are… [it is] quite easy to fix.”
Cope added schemes should verify addresses they hold to ensure members have not moved or died.
Roger Mattingly, director at independent trustee company Pan Trustees, said: “It would be rare to find a scheme that has up-to-date, accurate addresses for all members. It is common [that] addresses are a problem.”
He added: “If it’s a small amount – either that [schemes] think is insignificant or its gone off their radar – the trustees will do what they can, but sometimes they’ve gone abroad or, God forbid, they’ve died.”
