My £3,687 pension transfer into Civil Service pot has vanished!

H.C. writes: The Civil Service Pension Scheme has informed me that I do not have any benefits due because I only worked at the DVLA for a few months in 2009. I do not disagree with this. However, the scheme did accept a transfer of £3,687 from my earlier local authority job in Manchester. That money has disappeared, and the Civil Service scheme has denied its existence, so where have my pension contributions gone?

THE confusion over your pension highlights what can happen when employees change jobs, even with major employers. And the worst aspect is that everything looks fine until you retire and discover your pension pot has leaked cash.

You were a member of the Greater Manchester Pension Fund before you switched jobs and joined the DVLA. Your £3,687 was transferred to the Civil Service scheme, but you did not stay with the DVLA very long, so strictly speaking, your pension rights should have been transferred back to Manchester. Instead, the two pension schemes decided to leave things as they were, and your pension pot stayed with the Civil Service scheme, now administered by a company called MyCSP.

MyCSP told you that because you were only briefly at the DVLA, ‘this means you have no benefits in the Civil Service Pension Scheme’. That was plain wrong. I gave MyCSP your details and asked staff to investigate again and this time they found your missing money.

They blamed the previous scheme administrator, Capita, for incorrectly accepting the transfer.

But because of this, MyCSP had to go as high as the Cabinet Office in Whitehall to keep you in the scheme even though you were employed only briefly. The good news is that Whitehall said yes, and you are now officially a Civil Service pensioner.