Public sector retirement drive ‘leading to pensions errors’

THE rush to retire workers early in order to reduce the public sector wage bill is leading to errors in pension entitlement calculations, the Pensions Ombudsman has warned.

In one example of the pressure being put on human resources staff by the retirement push, 2,000 workers opted to leave the HSE under a scheme announced late last year but 17,000 asked for their pension payments to be worked out before they made a decision.

“There are a lot of difficulties in the public service and a lot of people who are perhaps finding it difficult to get things finalised because of the big rush,” said ombudsman Paul Kenny, who highlighted the issue in his annual report.

“I have great sympathy for the superannuation officers [in the HSE].

“It’s inevitable in those situations that mistakes will be made and things will be done incompletely and that will give rise to complaints.

“They also had to put routine work aside to attend to this and people scheduled to retire had payments delayed. We have been seeing the knock-on effect.”

He warned that problems would continue under the general early retirement scheme for public sector workers, which allows those who apply to leave before March 1, 2012, to have their pension calculated on the basis of what their salary was prior to pay cuts made in the past two years.

“People who want to benefit from this provision have to give notice of their intention to retire by November 29 this year, and I think there will be a lot of people who will want to retire or who will think about it.

“The pressure will be enormous right up to March 1. An awful lot of illustrations will have to be provided and there are bound to be problems. It’s not the sort of thing you can parachute people into to help with the workload — pensions are a specialist area.”

Mr Kenny said his own office, which has a staff of 10, was not expecting any increase in staffing to deal with the extra workload.

Meanwhile, the HSE is considering a ruling by Mr Kenny in a complaint taken by an ambulance worker whose overtime was not counted for pension purposes, despite it being regular, rostered and largely involuntary.

The case, which could have implications for other health service workers and increase pension costs for the HSE, centred on eight hours of ambulance cover that had to be provided every week at the Swords ambulance base in Co Dublin, over and above the staff’s contracted hours.

In effect, it meant that, taking turns with colleagues, the employee covered the period once every four weeks. The HSE argued that the overtime was not regular and was optional but the Ombudsman found that, in practice, the worker had little choice and the extra hours had become part of his normal working schedule.