Financial Skills: Pensions: Introduction to Pensions

Audience

• Human resources and payroll personnel
• Non-specialists responsible for administering pension schemes
• Trustees bound by law to supervise them

Skills Gained

This seminar will help you to:

• Grasp the total picture of state and private pensions
• Relate that picture to your own firm's pensions policy
• Anticipate new law proposed for the future
• Avoid embarrassing encounters with the regulators
• Understand the importance of the scheme trustees' functions

Above all this seminar will supply you with specific action points you can apply to your own organisation's circumstances.

Course Outline

1. UK pensions structure

• Introduction
• State pension scheme
• The pension credit
• Occupational schemes
• Personal pensions
• Stakeholder pensions

2. New reform directions

• The Turner Commission's ideas
• The under-provision problem
• Solutions - more compulsion, incentives, higher pension ages

3. The trustees' role

• The idea of a trust
• The basic duties of the trustees
• Delegation
• Investment of the trust monies
• Discretionary powers
• Dealing with disputes
• The Pensions Ombudsman
• Sanctions against delinquent trustees
• Protection for trustees

4. Main features of occupational pensions

• Pension formula
• The pros and cons of contracting out
• Final salary vs money purchase
• Retirement cash option
• Post-retirement increases
• Additional voluntary contributions
• Final salary funding
• Scope for flexibility at retirement

5. Main occupational death benefit features

• Death benefits after retirement
• Survivor pensions
• What 'survivor' means
• Death-in-service lump sums

6. HM Revenue & Customs functions

• Tax reliefs
• Benefit and contribution restrictions
• The earnings cap
• The post-2006 simplified regime

7. Early leavers

• Preserved pensions
• Transfer options
• Early retirement pension

8. Legal requirements

• The Pensions Acts 1995 and 2004
• Security, protection, regulation
• Divorce
• Sex equality
• Compensation scheme
• Member-nominated trustees

9. Open forum question and answer

Financial Skills: Pensions: Introduction to Pensions / F-PE-IP