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Trustees warned about 'moral judgements'
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| Jocelyn Furlan
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Superannuation fund trustees have been warned against making ‘moral judgements’ with respect to death benefit claims.
The chair of the Superannuation Complaints Tribunal (SCT), Jocelyn Furlan, has used the Tribunal’s quarterly bulletin to both point to the difficulties in dealing with death benefit claims and to warn on the moral judgement issue.
“Without trying to underestimate the difficulties in determining the existence, and relative degree, of dependency among various potential beneficiaries, the Tribunal has observed an increasing trend of instances where trustees appear to have been influenced, to varying degrees, by considerations which are more along the line of a ‘moral judgement’ rather than an objective consideration of needs and reliance,” she said.
Furlan said trustees were obliged to determine the potential beneficiaries by reference to the definition of ‘dependent’ in accordance with their trustees and the Superannuation Industry (Supervision) legislation, and then evaluate the extent to which each claimant was reliant on the deceased at the time of death and would be likely to have been reliant on the deceased’s superannuation into the future.
She noted that the SCT had experienced an increase in the number of complainants who, despite never having lived with the deceased, claimed an interdependency relationship.
“The Tribunal notes that one of the requirements of an interdependency relationship under the SIS legislation is that the parties live together,” Furlan said. “The only exceptions to this requirement are where the parties did not live together because either or both of them suffer from physical, intellectual or psychiatric disability or they are temporarily living apart.”
AUTHOR
Mike Taylor
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