The Pension Funds Adjudicator remains optimistic that she will be able to arrest the backlog of more than 10 000 cases that she inherited from her predecessors, despite the heavy inflow of complaints from members of retirement funds.
Although Mamodupi Mohlala appears to face an impossible task and is unable to predict when her office will have cleared the mound of cases from previous financial years, she has implemented a number of steps that she believes will reduce the backlog in the near future.
Many variables
Mohlala says she expects to clear the backlog "as soon as possible" but cannot give a specific date by when this will be achieved because "it depends on many variables", such as the proposed implementation of a conciliation process to deal with some complaints, the nature of responses received to complaints, the number of complaints that are formulated correctly and those that are resubmitted correctly.
She would also not be drawn into saying how long you, as a fund member with a complaint, can expect to wait for a decision on a matter you take to the adjudicator's office.
Mohlala says the time taken to dispose of a complaint varies from case to case and depends on its complexity and whether it can be disposed of without the need to involve third parties. To give a time line would be misleading, she says.
400 complaints a month
On average, 400 new complaints roll into Mohlala's office each month.
Some of these are settled when the adjudicator's office asks the party that is the subject of the complaint to respond to the matter.
Some are found to concern matters that are not within the adjudicator's jurisdiction or are dismissed because the complaint is not made properly and the complainant fails to reformulate it adequately. The remaining cases need to be investigated and a determination made.
Mohlala says 56 percent of both the new complaints and the cases opened in previous financial years require determinations.
She says the number of determinations that she signs off each month varies, but in the month of May, 213 cases were signed off.
But Mohlala says it is not possible to analyse the progress her office is making in reducing the backlog of cases by just computing the number of new complaints that will require determination each month and comparing it with the number of cases signed off in a month.
She says even if a matter requires a ruling, it may not be ready for determination in the month in which it is lodged, and matters that are identified for determination are first referred to merit teams for a draft determination.
These teams have monthly targets which determine the number of matters they finalise in a month and at times there may be issues that they wish to investigate further prior to preparation of a determination, the adjudicator says.
These draft determinations are referred to Mohlala and if she is satisfied with a draft, she signs it off. If she is not satisfied, she refers the case back to the teams for further investigation within specified times.
Reducing the load
To reduce her office's case load Mohlala has embarked on, or plans to implement, certain steps. These steps include:
- Issuing default determinations against funds or other parties, such as employers, who do not respond to requests for comments on complaints. Funds or employers will be asked three times for a response and if they still fail to respond, a ruling will be issued based on the information before the adjudicator's office.
Default determinations - some by letter and two formal ones - have already been issued. One of the formal default rulings was against a fund that failed to respond to numerous requests from the adjudicator's office on a complaint about the fund's decision to place death benefits in a trust and the other was against an employer that failed to pay over a member's contribution to a fund;
- Compiling a scorecard showing which funds are the source of the most legitimate complaints. Mohlala has announced that she will launch the scorecard at her office's 10th anniversary celebrations in October this year; and
- Referring cases to a conciliation process. The adjudicator announced the conciliation process early last month and issued guidelines on how the process would work. She invited stakeholders to comment on the proposed process, and the comment period closed late last month.
Mohlala says her office received a lot of input on the conciliation process and is now finalising the guidelines. She expects the conciliation process will be introduced in August. These measures are aimed at addressing the backlog and streamlining the work flow in the adjudicator's office so as to avoid future backlogs, Mohlala says.
Call for a deputy
The adjudicator has also asked the Financial Services Board to appoint a deputy adjudicator to assist her in signing off cases.
It is unclear how this request will be received, but the appointment of such a deputy could have a positive affect on the case load, she says.
Until any one of these steps has a measurable effect on the workload of the adjudicator's office, Mohlala says this is what you can expect when you lodge a complaint:
- You can expect to receive notification that the office has received your complaint within 14 working days of it receiving your complaint;
- If 21 working days have passed since the adjudicator's office should have received your complaint and you have still not had a letter acknowledging your complaint, contact the adjudicator's office or re-submit your complaint; and
- After receiving the letter of acknowledgement of your complaint, you should hear from the adjudicator's office within 35 working days. This is because your complaint should be sent for a response to your fund or employer or whichever party is the subject of your complaint. The person or entity that is the subject of your complaint has 30 working days to respond to your complaint.
The adjudicator's office should be able to send you the response it receives within five days of receiving it and you will then have a further seven days to comment on the response. Before you inquire about your case, wait at least 60 days after the letter acknowledging your complaint because the person or entity that is the subject of your complaint may have asked for an extension to the 30 days it has to respond to your complaint.
Once the adjudicator's office has your reply to the response to the complaint, the adjudicator's office will consider the complaint.
Here there are no guidelines on how much patience you should have, but Mohlala says the office has a dual strategy of dealing with complaints according to the date received and in other instances according to the nature of the complaint. However, she says, the office always seeks to ensure matters are dealt with in the most efficient and legally correct manner.
Contact
The Pension Funds Adjudicator is Mamodupi Mohlala.
Cape Town office:
Telephone 021 674 0209
Fax: 021 674 0185
email: [email protected]