Employer update 07 2019

Operational updates

For action

Members opting-out and withdrawing

Each quarter we invite you to provide details of how many members opted-out or withdrew in the previous quarter, for what reason and in what age bracket. This valuable information can help inform scheme and product design and was requested by the scheme’s stakeholders including UUK and UCEA. You can now submit your results for the last quarter (April-June) now via the survey button below: The information you need is included on the opt-out and withdrawal forms.

If you’d like to know more about the initial results, read the article Why don’t employees join USS?

Have you requested your AA taper letters?

Last month we invited you to request AA taper letters for members whose earnings outside USS may cause them to exceed the Annual Allowance (AA). The AA for 2018/19 tax year is £40,000. You can read more about the AA in our factsheet and there’s an Introduction to pension tax online.

All members will have their AA figure for 2018/19 included in their annual member statement. Members whose contributions to USS exceed £40,000 will also have their carry forward figures for the last three years included in their statement so you won’t need to request a letter for these members.

Please submit your request on an Excel spreadsheet, via the employer portal Send us a file, with:

• National insurance number
• Member surname
• Date of birth
• Member number (if known)
• please name your file ‘XXXX AA taper request’ where XXXX is your institution code

To ensure that you receive the AA taper letters by 31 October please request the letters no later than 31 July 2019.

If you have any queries please contact Paul Cowley, Operations Manager.

Intermittent error: Additional contributions report

A recent error identified with the Additional contributions report means that it may not always include all the members who have chosen to cancel their match contribution. The cancellation will have been recorded on their USS record but you may continue to make the deduction from their salary.

Only a small number of the members cancelling their match since April are affected. All other additional contribution updates are working as normal. Please continue to run the report each month.

The contributions interface will reject affected members with an error in the correction file. You will see the message below (depending on whether the contribution is paid via salary sacrifice):

Field Employee 1% Matching DC AVC (Salary Sacrifice) is populated but no AVC contract exists
Field Employee 1% Matching DC AVC (Non Salary Sacrifice) is populated but no AVC contract exists

There are two ways we can rectify the issue for you:

1. You can remove the match contribution from the interface file and resubmit. You should then refund the member and we will refund you via the monthly contribution payment reconciliation process; or
2. If the member is content to keep the additional match contribution payment invested, we will manually change the end date and you would cease the contribution from the following month.

You can let us know about affected members by telephoning or emailing the Client Engagement team. If you have any queries please contact USSInterfaceSupport@uss.co.uk

We are currently looking at a fix and offer our sincere apologies for the inconvenience. In the meantime we have included a message on My USS asking members who cease the match to notify their payroll departments. We’ll keep the service updates page of the employer portal updated with further information.

USS data remediation

As part of our ongoing data remediation work to make sure our members’ records are accurate and up to date, we have updated the status of around 8,700 members who are no longer contributing to USS from ‘active’ to ‘unknown’. These are members occasionally referred to as ‘active non-active’ and up to now have been manually removed from bulk mailing exercises like the annual member statements.

It is possible that VTE members who have not contributed for some time, or members who have been on long term absence may have been updated too. In these cases there will be a rejection when you submit the contribution interface file. You just need to let us know and we can update their status, usually within the hour, and you’ll be able to submit as normal. You would receive the message below in your interface correction file:

Employee found but not Active status, check file and if HR file should be submitted first

If you have any queries please contact USSInterfaceSupport@uss.co.uk.

Report and Accounts released this week

We’ll be releasing the 2019 Report and Accounts later this week. We’ll let you know via the employer portal dashboard when it’s available.

We won’t be sending any members’ annual report this year but our next member update will be sent this week, where we’ll be letting members know that the Annual Report and Accounts is available on our website. Please forward this as usual.

Please direct members to our new Annual Report animation online. The short, member friendly, animation draws out the key points from the report and accounts. It covers information about our funds under management, the in-house management team and USS’s attainment of Master Trust status, as well as the USS relationship with members and employers. It’ll go live later this week at the same time as the full report and accounts, please do share it with your members.

For information

AMS 2019: distribution date announced

Annual member statements 2019 will be distributed during week commencing 16 September. We’re keeping the AMS 2019 page of the employer portal updated with important information and key dates about the exercise. Please make sure that you visit the AMS page regularly.