A technical manager has reminded practitioners of the process by which clients with restricted non-preserved superannuation benefits can lift this constraint and gain access to their retirement savings.
An individual may have restricted non-preserved benefits if they had superannuation contributions made on their behalf prior to 30 June 1999.
“These components, should your clients have them, can be made up of such things as voluntary employer contributions that might have gone [into the fund] in the ‘90s or earlier,” BT Financial Group advice strategy and technical specialist Tim Howard explained.
Howard pointed out while these types of benefits are rare, there is a fairly simple procedure that allows a fund member to access them.
“If your client, the member, has left the employer who made those contributions, then at any time they can apply to the trustees to make that component unrestricted non-preserved and would allow them to access that benefit [whenever they want to],” he noted.
According to Howard, there are several accepted forms of evidence representing proof the individual in question is no longer working for the employer who made the super contributions categorised as being restricted non-preserved.
“Every trustee will be different in [the information] they want to satisfy themselves [the individual] has left that employer. I’ve seen examples of them asking for a termination certificate [containing the] termination details from when [the person] left,” he said.
He acknowledged the amount of time that has passed since the employee left the said employer might make providing this type of evidence challenging.
“I’ve seen other examples where [the superannuant] just needs to declare on the application what day [they] left that employer,” he noted.
“[But it is] a question to [ask] the current trustees [as to] what they might need to satisfy that condition.”
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