An Alexander Forbes retirement fund’s decision to allocate a death benefit has been set aside by the Pension Funds Adjudicator because the administrator failed to conduct thorough investigations and, instead, relied on a benefits calculator to tell them what to do.
In this case, Alexander Forbes did not follow the beneficiary nomination form to the letter. Rather, it considered the extent of the beneficiaries’ dependency on the deceased and apportioned the death benefit using the set calculation.
“The fund cannot merely rely on a calculator that predetermines entitlements to portions of a salary depending on a beneficiary’s status,”
