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AusSuper to hand out $4.2m for death benefit claim delays
The country’s largest super fund is set to compensate some 7,000 people who have been impacted by delayed handling times.
AustralianSuper has commenced a program to compensate beneficiaries whose death benefit claims took longer than the fund’s internal target handling time of four months from the date when the claim form was received.
According to the fund, a cohort of around 7,000 people will receive a letter detailing how much money they will be entitled to, with an estimated amount of remediation of around $4.2 million in total.
The fund is also reviewing and finalising investigations into a smaller cohort of beneficiaries who may also be affected.
“AustralianSuper is committed to putting members first but we don’t always get everything right and we are sorry for that,” chief member officer, Rose Kerlin, said.
“When we become aware of an issue our priority is to resolve it and provide members and their beneficiaries with the service they expect and deserve.”
Kerlin confirmed that, over the coming months, AustralianSuper will be contacting members’ beneficiaries who have been impacted by previous delays.
“This is being done regardless of why the delay occurred,” she said.
The CMO said that a key driver to the growth in death claims – thus affecting assessment and payment time frames – is an increase in members, particularly elderly members, and an increase in the death of members during the COVID-19 period.
“Over the past 18 months, AustralianSuper has undertaken a thorough review of the Fund’s processes and implemented a number of important changes,” Kerlin said.
“We initially doubled the size of the team supporting members’ beneficiaries through the claims process at our service provider so we could more efficiently manage these claims and pay members’ beneficiaries as quickly as possible.
“While this made important improvements, we didn’t feel it went far enough. After sustained attempts to improve performance with our service provider, we formed the view that our old arrangements would not be able to deliver the service with the speed, care and empathy members expect.”
As such, in December of last year, the fund announced changes to its member service model, including insourcing its death claims management through a new Bereavement Centre, which opened in April with an internal team of 75 fund employees.
According to AustralianSuper, all death claims are now managed internally and all beneficiaries are assigned a case manager as a single point of contact for the entire process.
“With the changes the fund has made we have seen a 53 per cent reduction in long standing claims since August 2023,” Kerlin said.
AUTHOR
Jessica Penny
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