The chances of you receiving a fillip to your retirement savings or pension from an employer-sponsored retirement fund are receding.
The initial industry estimates of between R80 and R90 billion in pension funds surpluses waiting to be paid out at least in part to fund members and pensioners are fast being reassessed as the (retirement) funds' surplus apportionment scheme proposals being submitted to the Financial Servicers Board (FSB) gain momentum.
But the FSB still has no idea of what the final figure will be as thousands of submissions still have to be made to it.
Nor can the FSB predict when the process will be over because many of the surplus apportionment schemes that have been submitted are being sent back to the relevant funds.
The process is also being delayed because of the Sanlam court action, which sets aside a requirement that employers must repay historical unacceptable uses of a surplus.
Funds are being asked to rework their submissions for a variety of reasons, including faulty investment valuation reports; the creation of excessive contingency reserves (money held back in the fund to meet possible future liabilities which reduces the amount of the surplus distributed); excessive costs; incomplete submissions and a failure by funds to wait the required 12 weeks for objections before they submit their surplus apportionment schemes to the FSB .
Dormant funds
On top of this, many retirement funds are virtually dormant, with only unclaimed benefits in their reserves, thus complicating the process of estimating how many funds have a real surplus.
As at February 28, 579 surplus distribution applications have either been approved by the FSB or are pending approval or the fund must provide more information.
The total value of the surplus in these 579 funds was R12.5 billion. A further 15 105 schemes have submitted returns saying that they have no surplus to distribute.
FSB-appointed tribunals
Christiaan Ahlers, a pensions actuary at the FSB, told the Pension Lawyers' Association annual convention this week that many funds have gone way over their deadline for submitting surplus apportionment schemes and the FSB now has to appoint tribunals to determine surplus apportionments.
He says the FSB appoints tribunals as a last resort because of the expense involved for funds.
Tribunals are appointed when efforts to get funds and/or their administrators to submit apportion-ment schemes "fall on deaf ears".