I tried to register online to see how well my pension pot was growing, but I couldn’t log in, so I was forced to contact my provider, Scottish Widows, by phone.

The most recent pension statement I had to hand was from 2021. I was asked for my policy number, which I gladly gave. I was then informed that I had “transferred out” my fund back in 2019. I asked for more information but was told “I can’t tell you more as we have changed our IT systems in recent years”.

I had transferred out some of my pension money, but around £55,000 should have remained in the fund. I expressed my shock that Scottish Widows had lost this money, and I was told to send them a copy of my annual statement from the year 2020 / 2021. 

I was told that nothing after 2019 was visible from its end. I shared a copy of a 2022 statement, as this is all I had to prove the money was there.

Many apologies on the phone later, after two weeks I received a letter again explaining that all my money was transferred out in 2019. However it cannot tell me where it was moved to.

I have so many questions for Scottish Widows. How come it cannot trace the very pensions it is supposed to be managing?

How can it have no copies of the statements it sent me? And how can an IT changeover cause entire pension pots to disappear?

At the time of writing this remains unresolved, and I am unsure how to force Scottish Widows to locate my pension pot and recover the lost growth.

HE, via email

Dear reader,

Back in 2018 you decided to move your pension from Scottish Widows to the management of a financial adviser, who you felt would invest it in a better way for you. So you transferred out a substantial six-figure sum, leaving a value of £1.99 in the policy.  

However, your employer continued to pay your pension into Scottish Widows, and you maxed out your £40,000 annual pension contribution for 2019. As such a sum of £55,000 remained in the pension.

In that year, your employer told Scottish Widows that it had accidentally overpaid into the pension by £10,213. It asked Scottish Widows to send the funds back, which it did.

However, due to a human error when managing the transfers, it did not then correctly reinstate the claim at that point, after further employer contributions were received until July 2020. At this point you were unfortunately sacked from your job, and therefore no more money was paid into your Scottish Widows pension.

This error by Scottish Widows – not an IT glitch as you were told – is apparently why your pension appeared to have disappeared. In fact it was never lost, you were just seeing a value of zero. 

As a result of this error, Scottish Widows has corrected the value of your pension and agreed to take the appropriate steps to make sure you have not been financially disadvantaged.

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