Pressure on government to reunite $17.5 billion lost super with rightful owners

IT’S unbelievable in this day and age of data matching that we still have $17.5 billion in “lost” superannuation. How is this possible? I smell a rat, writes Karina Barrymore.

OK, call me a cynic. A nonbeliever, a doubter, a sceptic. I’ll own up to all of these descriptions, because, well, some things are just too unbelievable to, um, believe.

In particular, $17.5 billion in so-called “lost” superannuation!
How is this possible? I smell a rat.

For a start, it’s not actually lost. Those billions of dollars are either sitting in superannuation accounts clocking up administration fees or they are earning interest for the government.

ATO STATISTICS SHOW $17.5B IN LOST SUPER IS WAITING

HOW MUCH SUPER DO YOU NEED FOR RETIREMENT?

PROPERTY INVESTING A HIGH RISK FOR SUPER FUNDS

So we know where the money is. What we don’t seem to know is who it belongs to.

Pull the other leg!

The only reason this money is sitting around providing morning tea for all the greedy super fund managers is because of their bad administration practices.

In every situation, the super fund is to blame and at fault for not being able to identify who the money belongs to.

Billions of dollars are either sitting in superannuation accounts clocking up administration fees or they are earning interest for the government.

So let’s just look at that in a bit more detail.

Receiver unknown: Even if the employer who sent in the money had the wrong spelling of the staff member’s name, the wrong account number, wrong birth date, or they opened a new account without checking these details, it is still the super fund’s responsibility to confirm the identity and details of every account.

To accept money under these circumstances is wrong. But that’s what they appear to have done.

No longer at this address: The next big suspicious excuse is that the original account member can no longer be located. Puh-lease!

Surely, we haven’t time warped back to the 1800s when we had to rely on hand-sketched identity documents and horseriding postal deliveries.

Everybody has official identification these days, you can’t get a job without it.

You can’t attend school, graduate, drive a car, rent a flat, get a job or even die without it.

Yet we’re supposed to believe that these giant financial institutions known as superannuation funds, and their giant institutional administrators can’t find — oh, how many is it now? — more than six million of us.

Somehow, the owners of six million super accounts have gone AWOL and their names, birth dates, school records, families, passports, phone accounts, driver’s licences and even their energy bills don’t offer a single clue as to how to locate them. Unbelievable!

Data mismatch: So, here’s where we really have to suspend reality.

Sure, the super funds get to feed off those “lost” accounts so there is little encouragement for them to do the right thing. But we are also supposed to believe that the ATO can’t find the owners of the money either.

To believe the ATO can’t find them, we have to pretend the ATO doesn’t have access to every cent of interest we receive from our bank deposits, every dollar of income we earn and every transaction we make through a bank account.

We also have to pretend the ATO can’t locate the address or phone number of six million lost super-fund owners, yet it can data match their share trading history for the past four years, or track down a wayward joint account or a property detail from decades ago.

I guess that’s just me being a sceptic, again.

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