Unclaimed pension fund benefits amount to a whole lot of money which is sitting in the coffers of the Insurance companies awaiting distribution and you could be one of the lucky ones who is able to collect.

Here is the process to follow in order to make a claim for unlaimed benefits.

See the screen grab below for the information you will need to make the queries.

If you or anyone in your family has been with a few different companies over the years and contributions to a pension or retirement fund were made, it is well worth using the FSB’s unclaimed benefit search to see if any benefits are owing.

The worrying thing about the fact that there are R millions of unclaimed benefits is that it appears very little effort is going into attempting to find these beneficiaries or the beneficiaries of their estates.

In most cases, the owner of the benefit has died and the company does not know how or where to contact the family members. The families of these policy owners are legally entitled to this money.

The search of the unclaimed pension benefits database is a simple search which can either be dione by fund name or by beneficiary name. I suggest that use the simplest form of the unclaimed benefit search by simply entering the surname and scrolling through the list as the Initial convention used in the database is not uniform, some are displayed as G.C or G.C. or GC, you get the idea.

UPDATED November 2020

Search the FSCA Unclaimed pension benefits database.

You are able to search for your own unclaimed benefits, as well as a family member or friend that has given you permission to search on their behalf.

Below is a creen grad showing the information required to do the search on the database.

If you do find unclaimed pension benefits from any fund, the search results will display the fund name, the contact details(in most cases) and the person to contact.

If the pension benefits show a company that you are not aware of familiar with, give them a call anyway, you never know, there may be a significant amount of money that you or the family are legally entitled to in the form of unclaimed pension benefits.

Unclaimed benefits are estimated to be in the R billions and will likely be forfeited to some fund or other under the Governments control after a defined number of years. There is much debate about what should happen with these unclaimed benefits and in light of the many discussion documents and proposals around the use of pension funds ho help restart the economy, you can imagine the temptation to get their hands on this enormous amount of money.

Perhaps it is a viable option for The ANC to use some of the much older unclaimed benefits and then to put some sort of contingency fund in place to cover a percentage of what may be clkaimed based on the past 10 years experience of tracking down relatives of those with unclaimed benefits.

Related posts:

How to Claim your portion of unclaimed benefits from your pension fund What to do if your employer has not been paying over your pension fund/retirement contributions R456 Million in unclaimed benefits at GEPF Data Factory Unclaimed Benefits Claim Assistance Easier access to unclaimed benefits in 2021