Persistence pays off for woman on the hunt for missing cheque

BY JANET GIBSON

All Anne Blais wanted to do was buy past service for her pension plan. Two years later, she’s still waiting for the transaction to be processed.

Blais started working at the Northeastern Ontario Regional Cancer Centre in 1990. She started contributing to its pension plan about a year later. When the centre merged with Sudbury Regional Hospital in December 2003, the pension plan was transferred to Hospitals of Ontario Pension Plan (HOOPP).

Blais’ nightmare started in December 2005 when HOOPP offered members the opportunity to buy past service. In other words, members could “buy” a period of time when they’d worked for their employer but hadn’t made pension contributions. In doing so, they’d beef up their future benefits.

Blais mailed HOOPP a request for a quote. HOOPP told her she could buy 32 1/2 weeks of past service for $4,514.25. The quote would expire on April 5, 2006. Blais went to her branch of the CIBC in Sudbury, which co-ordinated with CIBC in Toronto to send a cheque to HOOPP. Blais went on the Internet and saw that the money had been taken out of her account. Then she forgot about it.

She saw a red flag in November 2006. She noticed extra money in her account and thought it had come from some of her investments.

In October 2007, she attended a pension planning session hosted by HOOPP. She asked the representative if a purchase of past service would show up on her statement. He said yes. However when he looked at the statement, he didn’t see it.

“That set off alarms for me,” she said. “I went to CIBC.”

Less than a week later, Blais got some news that shocked her. CIBC confirmed the funds had been transferred out.

But they also told her the funds had been returned to her account in September 2006.

In an e-mail sent to Northern Life, CIBC spokesman Rob MacLeod wrote, “CIBC sent the cheque to HOOPP as requested in March 2006. However, HOOPP never cashed it. As a result, there is no copy (of the cheque) to provide. When funds are transferred between two registered accounts on behalf of a client, CIBC will issue a cheque drawn on a corporate account in order to guarantee the funds. That amount will be transferred from a client’s RRSP account into the corporate account, pending the cheque clearing. In this case, since the cheque was never cleared, the funds remained in the corporate account and were transferred back to the client after six months following the cancellation of the cheque.”

For eight months, any spare time Blais could muster was spent e-mailing and telephoning her pension company and bank.

Finally, HOOPP scheduled an hour on June 17 for three of its employees to talk to Blais on the phone. The call lasted 15 minutes.

Manager of member services Garvin Teelucksingh repeated what Blais had already heard. HOOPP hadn’t received any funds from CIBC, which in turn hadn’t been able to provide a copy of the cheque.

Teelucksingh gave Blais two options, both of which he called “a good deal.” She could buy the past service for $511 more than the original quote or pay the original amount and buy a smaller number of weeks.

HOOPP spokesman Martin Biefer told Northern Life it would be “completely inappropriate for HOOPP to comment to the media about a matter like this, even if the member consented. HOOPP has a duty to administer the plan and enforce the plan rules consistently for every member. HOOPP simply cannot make special exceptions to the rules.”

On July 17, Blais got word that CIBC had decided to give her $511, meaning she could buy her past service for the original amount quoted by HOOPP with CIBC picking up the difference. CIBC spokesman Rob MacLeod did not return a call from Northern Life.