Pension Awareness Day was held on Feb. 15, to let Ontario residents know they might be able to reconnect with a lost pension.
As odd as it sounds, there is data to indicate that thousands of Ontario are entitled to huge chunks of money they might have lost track of over the years.
There is a formal office in Ontario - the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario - that oversees the rights of consumers in Ontario by promoting high standards of business conduct and transparency within the financial services we regulate, said a news release.
Andrew Fung is executive vice president for pensions at the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario (FSRA).
Fung said the law in Ontario changed in 2017 and "it requires pension plan administrators to, every two years, send a communication or a statement to people who have left employment, so that they can keep in contact with these previous plan members that may still have an entitlement to the pension plan."
Fung said it is not unusual at all for people who have had several jobs over the years to forget about a pension plan they may have contributed to.
"People move on, they change their address, they move, they forget to tell the plan administrators that they have changed their address or email address or telephone number … that's how when these plan members are gone and missing all the time,” he said. “If you are 20 years old, starting out, by the time you retire, it's really likely that you will have maybe six or seven different jobs, and you will have forgotten that the job that you had 30 years ago, you might actually have a pension entitlement. So it can happen in many different ways.”
He said at last count, there are more than 200,000 pension claim members entitled to roughly $3 billion in unclaimed pension benefits.
Fung said this is one of the reasons why the FSRA organization hopes to create more awareness by holding a pension awareness day every February.
He said this is especially true for older residents, many who are of the Baby Boomer generation, who might have held several different jobs over the past 30 or 40 years.
"The whole idea is to create that kind of awareness about pension plans, the value of pension plans, how it makes a difference in terms of retirement security, financial security, every time," said Fung.
With respect to who is responsible for connecting with a former pension, Fung said both the employee and the employer should make the effort.
"So if you leave employment, and then you have since then kind of changed your address or email address or contact information, the onus is on you to make sure that you inform your previous employer of the records update. Okay, so the onus is on the plan members," said Fung.
"By the same token, it is also on the plan administrators to keep track of these people who have left employment. They should actually have a communication strategy that keeps them in contact, beyond perhaps the bare minimum of, you know, and statements every two years required by law. So I think the onus is on both sides." he added.
Fung said the FSRA website is available to help plan members search back to determine if they have a forgotten pension benefit owing to them.
"They should visit the FSRA pension plan Information Access Portal, to search for their plan, by either the sponsor or company name. The portal will help them get the contact information for their past pension," said Fung.
"If their past employer had a registered pension plan in Ontario, they should then contact the administrator to see if they have them on the record, because FSRA does not collect member information and we can't look up whether the person was a member or not. If that does not work, the person should try to look back on their pension plan documents that they might have collected over the years," he said.
Len Gillis is a reporter at Sudbury.com.
