Legality of retirement plan ‘may be unsound’

ONE of the country’s largest public sector unions has said the Government’s public service early retirement scheme revealed in last month’s budget, may not be not legally sound.

IMPACT, which represents more than 60,000 public servants, said the proposal was a “recipe for public service chaos”, which would force thousands of public servants, mostly on modest incomes, to gamble on their retirement income.

There must be certainty over the future tax treatment of pensions, including lump sum payments, before any scheme could be legally safe. It criticised the Government for sowing uncertainty over this in an attempt to force staff to take up the scheme.