The website of the Pension Funds Adjudicator will help you to make your case if you believe your retirement nest egg is under threat.
If you suspect something is amiss in the way your pension, provident, preservation or retirement annuity (RA) fund is run, or how it is investing your money, your first port of call should be the website of the Pension Funds Adjudicator ( www.pfa.org.za).
The adjudicator's office is mandated to assist you in settling complaints about your retirement fund in a cheap, quick and easy way.
The office's website supports this role, and if you plan to lay a complaint, visit the Publications section of the site and follow the Complaints Guidelines link.
From this page you can download the Complaints Guide in any of the 11 official languages. This document explains who can complain, when you can complain and what you can complain about. For example, you can complain about a fund only if you are a member or a beneficiary of the fund, an employer that participates in the fund, or a trustee of the fund.
And you cannot complain to the adjudicator if you are a member, beneficiary or trustee of a fund, such as the Government Employees Pension Fund, to which the government contributes financially.
The Complaints Guide document stipulates what you must do before you complain to the adjudicator - mainly that you must first take your complaint to the fund or your employer.
The guide also contains information on how to submit your complaint to the adjudicator and what to include in it. It contains a template that you can use to draw up your complaint. Alternatively, you can submit it online if you follow the Procedures and the Online Complaints Guide links.
In the Procedures section there is also a Frequently Asked Questions page, which contains much of the same information that is contained in the Complaints Guide, with one or two additional pieces of information. For example, both documents explain how the adjudicator will deal with your complaint, but the Frequently Asked Questions page also explains how the adjudicator's office has to remain impartial and cannot therefore give you advice.
If you have an RA and are planning to lodge a complaint about the after-effects of stopping or reducing your contributions, or retiring early, you also need to download A Guideline for RA Members from the Complaints Guidelines page. This document contains a list of questions you need to ask the trustees of your RA fund before you lodge your complaint. Deputy pension funds adjudicator Naleen Jeram says many people were laying complaints without having all the information they needed.
The questions you need to ask deal with issues such as the commission you have paid on your investment, the provisions in the fund rules that provide for this commission and increases in it when contributions are increased, the costs that are payable from your investment and the provisions in the rules for these costs.
You can also find most of the determinations made by Vuyani Ngalwana, the current adjudicator, or any of his predecessors. The rulings are listed both by the year in which they were made and by the subject matter of the ruling, which makes it easy to find ones that deal with similar issues to yours.
The latest determinations can be found on the home page and, in case you are keenly awaiting the outcome of one, they find their way on to the site at the same time that they are released to the media.
This article was first published in Personal Finance magazine, 2nd Quarter 2007. See what's in our latest issue