Pension Fund Trustees support workers' call for individual scheme managers

Pension Fund Trustees have waded into the controversy over the management of public sector pension funds.

The Trustees are the companies licensed to over-see the management of the workers' pensions contributions.      

Government as the employer in the public sector has appointed Pensions Alliance Trust Limited  as the Trustee for the workers' pensions contributions.  But the workers are kicking against this because they rather want it to be handled by their selected Trustees – the reason for their strike.

The workers are also demanding that their pensions contributions be transferred into their own registered schemes. The contributions are currently lodged in the Temporary Pensions Funds Account, (TPFA) at the Bank of Ghana.

JOY BUSINESS has also been engaging some of the licensed Trustees on the market some of whom are also making a case for government to review its decision to hand it over to one company. They argue, government needs to review the selection process to include more than one company to grow their industry.

Charles Osei Akoto, CEO of Stallion Trust stated “When you think about the fact that 45 percent of the formal sector workers are from the public sector and government lumps all these people and give them to one corporate trustee -  obviously that corporate trustee has a competitive advantage and that is what we are talking about”.

“And again confidence as usual is low because people would be like, well, is this just for a certain other purpose than what we have thought it to be? And so what I would say is that they should review the process. Either we do a pool of investment or say there are so many sectors of government so we should get some people to manage for health services, others for education and so on because you know it's quite a number” Victoria Ametor Armah, Head of Operations, PenTrust noted.

“If government thinks that all the 50% of the business in the formal sector should go to one out of the 25 corporate trustees I think for goodness sake if you want to encourage the private sector this is not the way to do it” William Yeboah, the Chief Executive of NBC Ghana Trust added.

The Trustees say the call by the workers only underscores the fact that the transfer of the funds to them is long over-due.