Dear reader,
Back in 2018 you decided to move your pension from Scottish Widows to the management of a financial adviser, who you felt would invest it in a better way for you. So you transferred out a substantial six-figure sum, leaving a value of £1.99 in the policy.
However, your employer continued to pay your pension into Scottish Widows, and you maxed out your £40,000 annual pension contribution for 2019. As such a sum of £55,000 remained in the pension.
In that year, your employer told Scottish Widows that it had accidentally overpaid into the pension by £10,213. It asked Scottish Widows to send the funds back, which it did.
However, due to a human error when managing the transfers, it did not then correctly reinstate the claim at that point, after further employer contributions were received until July 2020. At this point you were unfortunately sacked from your job, and therefore no more money was paid into your Scottish Widows pension.
This error by Scottish Widows – not an IT glitch as you were told – is apparently why your pension appeared to have disappeared. In fact it was never lost, you were just seeing a value of zero.
As a result of this error, Scottish Widows has corrected the value of your pension and agreed to take the appropriate steps to make sure you have not been financially disadvantaged.