Saturday 5 August 2023

The Voice - Consumer's Voice

Must we be interviewed?

(This message came from a lady who had recently lost her husband. After lengthy battles with her medical aid, her husband finally passed away a few months ago. Then she tried to obtain benefits from his pension scheme.)

With regards to insurance policies. Must a tax clearance for the deceased be submitted before the insurance is paid out to the family? After the insurance company had me running around for over 2 months with different documents all the time changing requirements. I eventually managed to submit and then they come back with this. Now they want to interview me and our daughter? She is in university overseas. She is also going to Europe in a couple of weeks so for her to come to Gabs is not going to happen until December. When my husband completed the forms he left 50% to each of us, why now must we prove that we need the money?


Firstly, I'm so sorry for your loss and for the struggles you and other bereaved relatives must endure after a tragic loss. I know insurance companies have procedures to follow but they often make a difficult situation even more difficult.

Yes, I believe that BURS insist that pension providers check whether someone owes tax before they pay out. That's the simple question. The second question is more complicated. Does the insurance company really need to interview you and your daughter before making the payments? I didn't know the answer to this but it struck me as surprising. So rather than guessing I asked a former colleague who's an expert. This is what he said:
"It's normal. The Retirement Funds Act allow members and pensioners to nominate Dependants as a guide to the Trustees. However, it also allows to Trustees to vary the content of any nomination form if there is any information that the Trustees come across that warrants that.

Members and dependants get upset when they hear that but it's actually designed to protect dependants. The examples I always give are when a young couple with 1 child nominate their child as the sole dependant and they go on to have other kids but forget to update the forms (which is very common). If both of them pass away, it would not be fair to leave out the other sibling dependants simply because the parents forgot to update their nomination forms.

Another example is where couple gets divorced and move on to start new families. If one of them passes away (the lady for instance) leaving small kids behind and forgets to update their form to remove the ex-husband, it would not be right to simply pay it over to the gent who will go on a holiday with his new wife and kids. These are very real (and actual) examples but more often than not, the benefits will be paid according to the nomination form that was completed.

Where no nomination form was completed the simplest thing is to get a family resolution certified by any Tribal Authority, District Commissioner etc, confirming who the dependants are."
Can he recover my money?

A few days ago I tried to trade through another person I met on Facebook. Initially I deposited P2,000 then P2,700 through Yellowcard. Later he changed the story to say the returns made after trading are too high, around P105,000 and needs around P9,000 to download software. I stopped trading.

Yesterday I discovered a page on Facebook called Yellow Card Recovery and they promised to follow up my issue cos I felt like the other guy wanted to scam me. I received email from the recovery page and he promised to recover my money. I was humbly asking if you can assist me to confirm if this is genuine. Thank you in advance.


I'm really sorry to tell you this but I suspect you know it already. You've been scammed and you're about to be scammed again. The first guy was obviously lying when he promised you P105,000 but this second guy who has offered to recover your original P4,700 is also lying to you. There is no way to recover money from scammers. They're criminals, no different to muggers in the street. Like muggers, they don't offer refunds.

No comments: