Sir, – Fintan O’Toole (“I’m about to turn 66 and the pension policies for people like me are bizarre”, Opinion & Analysis, February 13th) and Fiona Reddan (“Turning 66? New rules on PRSI could cost you money”, Your Money, January 30th) have highlighted a crude instance of the Department of Social Protection and the Department of Finance apparently not consulting with each other. It involves the conflict between the PRSI treatment of someone taking the State pension at 66 or deferring it until 70. Unfortunately, this type of silo thinking is all too common.
A much more serious instance will explode when the new auto-enrolment pension scheme is introduced later this year. The nub of the issue is a clash between the €1 for €3 top-up proposed for auto-enrolment, and the conventional tax relief on existing occupational pension schemes and PRSAs. The net effect is the creation of two separate incentives for pension saving, complicating things even further.
Standard rate taxpayers in the auto-enrolment scheme will get an effective 26.6 per cent top-up of their gross income, compared with the 20 per cent tax relief they receive on income forgone today. The opposite applies for higher rate taxpayers. They currently get tax relief of 40 per cent of gross income forgone, but under auto-enrolment will only get a third of 60 per cent of that amount; existing tax relief will therefore be a full double of the Department of Social Protection €1 for €3 top-up proposal. This latter anomaly is yet another example of a “perverse incentive”; it wilfully discourages participation in auto-enrolment for the 25 per cent (ESRI estimate) of those being automatically enrolled who will be higher-rate taxpayers.
Last spring, the joint Oireachtas Committee convened to consider auto-enrolment drew attention to this glaring conflict, but the Department of Social Protection insisted that a universal €1 for €3 top-up was Government policy. Did that include the Department of Finance? – Yours, etc,
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BRIAN WOODS,
Actuary,
Foxrock,
Dublin 18.
Sir, – Fintan O’Toole writes about glaring inconsistencies in the State pension and I have just discovered another.
Approaching retirement myself, I note that my English husband, who has worked here in Ireland and paid contributions for 25 years, is entitled to a full Irish contributory State pension, while I will only be entitled to a much smaller pension, despite having 32 years of contributions. This is because under the yearly average method, your entitlement is calculated as an average based on the years since you first started paying contributions. For an Irish citizen who started paying contributions at a much younger age, any large gap working abroad where no contributions were made, as in my case, means that your average is lower. The alternative calculation of total contributions may not serve you any better. I am guessing that this situation would be the case for many Irish citizens who worked abroad in the UK for a number of years.
Had my husband only worked here for only 10 years paying full contributions, he would still be entitled to the fuller pension under the yearly average method of calculation, while I am not.
The effect of this will be that if my husband lives for 20 years post-retirement, he will receive around €64,900 more than me in State pension payments, at today’s rate, despite having paid seven years’ fewer contributions than me. How is that fair? – Yours, etc,
MICHELLE COOKSON,
Bray,
Co Wicklow.