Issue - meetings

Vicky Jenks advised members they were looking at the update for December, as the January report had only just been received from the West Yorkshire Pension Fund. There had been some issues with getting payroll information onto the West Yorkshire portal, although this was due to a login issue rather than anything more significant. A new member of staff had taken on the role of sorting the information to be uploaded to the portal and ensure they were up to date. A payroll training event was taking place the following week involving the Warwickshire and West Yorkshire Pension Funds, and also Leicestershire and Hereford and Worcester Fire Authorities as these were also administered by Warwickshire payroll and there was a desire to ensure consistency in data sharing processes.

Vicky Jenks said there was an awareness there were some discrepancies in pension payments being either over or under what they should be, and work to correct this was taking place. She said around 220 pensioner payments were being checked, although this did not mean that all of them were incorrect. Members were told this would need to be logged as technically it counted as a breach. An overpayments policy was being worked on to set out how to deal with correcting payments that had been made incorrectly, such as identifying what had gone wrong and how an overpayment should be handled.

Helen Scargill said the KPI relating to death, retirement and dependent pensions setup wasn't quite meeting the 100 per cent KPI target. She said this probably related to one case missing the KPI and was not something to be overly concerned with. The average setup time was seven days.

Responding to a question from the Chair, Helen Scargill said the miscellaneous works captured in the graph in the report referred to telephone calls and emails that had been received but further action had not yet taken place.

Members were told the number of website hits was now being recorded, and there had been a significant increase in the number of people looking at the annual benefit statement production section. Helen Scargill said thought would be given to targeted communication on some points of information if the number of web hits stagnated, to ensure awareness of the issues remained high. A communication on the remedial service statement had been planned as this was felt to be a particularly important issue. Helen Scargill said member online registration with the Warwickshire Fire and Rescue Service numbers were similar to other clients of the West Yorkshire Fund. She drew members’ attention to other key pieces of data in the report and said there were no significant issues that required attention. She said she would clarify a point the Chair raised about 15 modified scheme members in the RDS and provide an update.

The Chair said it would be worth noting for the Board’s knowledge if there was any conditional data that was missing but had no significance to the payments being made. Additionally the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5