Pensions, they tell us, are a long-term thing requiring plenty of advance planning and action if they are to deliver on their potential. Someone should tell the Government.
Having first started talking about auto-enrolment as far back as 2006, the State will finally flick the switch on what it is calling My Future Fund, a full two decades later.
The new mandatory workplace pension will see up to 800,000 workers aged between 23 and 60 who are earning more than €20,000 per annum over one or more jobs but who are not signed up to any occupational pension scheme automatically paying into the new scheme from January.
But the Government really is adopting a lastminute.com approach to what is a mammoth logistical task.
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The chief executive and board members of the entity responsible for administering the entire enterprise – the National Automatic Enrolment Retirement Savings Authority – were named only this week.
And the portal through which the 800,000 workers will be signed up so that they and their employers can start paying into the scheme from January is going live only in December – the absolute busiest month of the year in the run-up to Christmas for retail and hospitality, two of the sectors most likely to be affected by the new scheme.
The Department of Finance says employers “will have a number of weeks” before that “go-live” date to input details into the portal, including preferred methods of payment, but even so.
Critically, anyone not signed up to an occupational scheme by December will have to be enrolled in the My Future Fund.
Why is the delivery of vital infrastructure so slow in Ireland?
That means employers looking to persuade those who have opted out of existing in-house schemes have just three months to get everything sorted – including those employees’ first pension deduction taken – or be forced to run a parallel auto-enrolment programme. In reality, the deadline is approximately eight weeks away.
With everyone only really getting back to normal in workplaces after summer now, as students return to school, that’s a very tight window for explaining to workers how they will have less money in their pay packet but that it is for their own good in the long term – and how they would be better signing on to an existing company scheme if that offers better terms.
