Agenda item

An update from the Chief Finance Officer on the Wiltshire Pension Fund Risk Register is circulated for Members’ consideration.

The Head of the Pension Fund, David Anthony, summarised his report, and explained that there were no significant changes in the risk register since the last meeting, however there were four areas where the risk remained at a medium level, instead of the target of low risk. These were as follows:

a)    PEN008: Failure to comply with LGPS and other regulations – A number of actions are on-going to mitigate this risk.  Workflow will monitor all tasks being undertaken by the Benefits Team, ensuring they follow the same procedures when processing work.  Currently this has only been rolled out to the Senior Pension Officers but all Pension Officers should be using this from October onwards.  The intention is this system will allow the monitoring of Employers performance in line with the Administration Strategy.  

There is also a need to review the current Pension Fund Team structure to ensure there is sufficient resource and knowledge available to not only monitor the team’s compliance with the regulations, but to ensure service standards are maintained and that the forthcoming changes surrounding the scheme, tax legislation, data records and auto-enrolment can be implemented.  The intention is the restructure will not significantly increase overall resources but allow for more technical posts to support the team to deal with the more complex issues facing the Fund.  All proposals need to be evaluated with HR and any additional costs will be approved by the Chief Finance Officer in liaison with the Chairman and Vice-Chairman prior to implementation.   

b)    PEN010:  Failure to keep pension records up to date and accurate – There has been detailed reconciliations undertaken between the Wiltshire Council payroll and the pension records.  The majority of the starters’ backlog has been resolved with the focus on the leavers records.  Once resolved, work will focus on the other large employers to reconcile data and address any issues. 

Once the Workflow project is fully implemented, an imaging project is planned in November to enable all documents to be scanned to ensure records are kept in a safe and consistent place.   

c)    PEN011:  Lack of expertise of Pension Fund Officersand Chief Finance Officer – as detailed above the Pension Team structure review will address any issues of knowledge gaps at the right levels, with particular reference to the administration of benefits.  All officers have the opportunity to identify any knowledge and skills gaps through the annual appraisal process.  The Fund has recently procured the CIPFA Knowledge and Skills Framework toolkit from Hymans Robertson which includes an evaluation process and a knowledge library to ensure officers have the relevant knowledge areas for their post.  This toolkit will be utilised over the coming months as part of officers learning and development programmes. 

d)    PEN013: Failure to communicate properly with Stakeholders – the Fund has refreshed its Communications Policy which is elsewhere on this agenda.  This includes taking a more pro-active approach to ensure scheme members are aware of their benefits.  The Fund has attended a ‘Pension Party’ at the request of Swindon UNISON to promote the scheme and will be running its first of a series of Pension Clinics on 29 September 2011 for Swindon Borough Council employees.   Work is on-going in ensuring employers are aware of their responsibility in respect of NEST and the changes to tax relief. 

Resolved:

To note the report