Appendix C - Information on recoverable payments

The Department of Finance is responsible for administering:

• the Parliamentary Contributory Superannuation Scheme (PCSS)
• the Judges’ Pensions Scheme
• the Governors-General Pension Scheme.

The legislation for these schemes requires reporting of recoverable payments that may arise on the inadvertent overpayment of benefits (see Table C1).

Such overpayments most often are a consequence of Finance receiving notification of an event that has a retrospective impact on the amount of a pension payment that had previously been made in good faith. In general, recoverable payments arise where:

• regular pension payments are paid, but Finance is later informed of the death of a member
• in the case of the PCSS, regular pension payments are paid, but Finance is later informed that the member undertook work in a recognised ‘office of profit’, which would have the effect of reducing the amount of pension entitlement in that earlier period
• there is payment of incorrectly calculated benefits due to system or human error. Note that, for 2018–19, there were no overpayments due to incorrectly calculated benefits.

All amounts are recovered, although annual amounts paid and amounts recovered in a financial year may not align where recovery of amounts is undertaken over consecutive financial years.

The number of recoverable payments and the amounts of those payments can vary significantly between financial years, particularly depending on the number of ‘office of profit’ positions held by retired parliamentarians in a relevant year.

Information for the three schemes for 2016–17 and 2017–18 were reported in the Finance Annual Report 2017–18. The Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation has administrative responsibility for the Commonwealth civilian and military superannuation schemes and the reporting of recoverable payments for these schemes.

Table C1: Recoverable superannuation scheme payments—parliamentarians, judges and governors-general, 2017–18 and 2018–19