The Kopanong Municipality in the Free State has been ordered to pay out the death benefits for two deceased employees after it failed timeously to inform the South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) National Provident Fund of their deaths.
In August 2006, the office of the Pension Funds Adjudicator (PFA) received two separate complaints, from beneficiaries M Matekane and L Makamela, stating that they had not received the benefits due to them years after the employees’ deaths.
Matekane’s father, Moiloa Tsoeu Ernest, who was employed by the Kopanong Municipality and belonged to the Samwu National Provident Fund, died on September 12, 2004. Momentum, the fund’s insurer, told the PFA it received a claim from the fund for Ernest’s death benefit more than a year later, on February 27, 2006.
C Rasigo, who was also a Kopanong Municipality employee and Samwu National Provident Fund member, died on December 27, 2001. A death benefit should have been paid out to his beneficiaries a year later, at the latest.
However, by December 2002, Makamela, his common-law spouse, had still not received the benefit payout.
In its response to the PFA’s queries, the Samwu National Provident Fund said that in both cases, the Kopanong Municipality, as the employer, failed to inform it of the death benefit claims within six months of Ernest’s and Rasigo’s deaths.
According to the fund’s rules, the fund is required to notify the insurer (Momentum) of a death benefit claim within six months of the date of a member’s death, failing which the claim will not be paid out by the insurer.
ADJUDICATOR’S RULING
In her ruling, Elmarie de la Rey, the acting adjudicator, says it is clear that the fault lay with the Kopanong Municipality. Momentum had repudiated the claims because the municipality had failed to inform the Samwu National Provident Fund of Ernest’s and Rasigo’s deaths within six months.
She ordered the Samwu National Provident Fund to calculate the death benefits that Matekane and Makamela would have been paid had the Kopanong Municipality timeously notified the fund of Ernest’s and Rasigo’s deaths.
De la Rey also ordered the fund to determine the beneficiaries in each case and their benefit entitlements, and to provide this information to the Kopanong Municipality within six weeks of the ruling.
De la Rey ordered the Kopanong Municipality, within seven days of receiving all the required information from the provident fund, to pay the beneficiaries their death benefits plus interest of 15.5 percent a year from the dates of the fund members’ deaths to the date of her determination.