In the Dark

It’s been a long day, but before heading home I thought I’d do a quick post to update what looks like turning into quite a saga. Not long ago I blogged about a surprise letter of condolence I received about my father’s death. It was a surprise because my Dad died nearly six years ago…

The letter I referred to above actually came from the Annuities Department of the Prudential. I didn’t name them in my previous post because I didn’t want to rock the boat, and in any case I couldn’t remember the Pru being among the list of companies I wrote to after the funeral all that time ago. In between my previous post and now I had the chance to go through my old correspondence and establish that I did, in fact, write to the Prudential soon after my father passed away. To confirm this, a few days ago I received another letter from them admitting that they received my letter in 2007 and failed to act on it. I hadn’t pursued the matter at the time, probably because I thought they would just stop the small annuity he was apparently receiving from them and that would be that. In fact it turns out some money is owed (and has been owing all this time) to my Dad’s estate and nobody at Prudential bothered to do anything about it until now. I’m not impressed.

Naturally I’m a bit cheesed off with this, as I now have to do a number of things (like getting a copy of my father’s death certificate) in order to claim the residual funds. I’ll also be expecting quite substantial compensation for the gross negligence Prudential have shown too.

However, the main reason for posting about this episode is that it doesn’t exactly inspire me with confidence about the workings of the Prudential. That’s worth bearing in mind by any academics who have taken out Additional Voluntary Contributions (AVCs) to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) in order to plan for early retirement or to make up for missing years’ contributions. You see, the USS voluntary contribution scheme is in fact managed by Prudential…