Australian Super to refund 100,000 Aussies

AustralianSuper will refund $70 million it overcharged 100,000 members after it failed to detect that they had multiple accounts.

The country's largest superfund has self-reported itself to regulators after realising it overcharged current and former members with multiple accounts.

The fund, which says it "regularly identifies and combines multiple accounts held by a single member to help those members avoid extra fees" admitted it made a blunder in not identifying all instances of multiple member accounts.

"This should not have happened, and we apologise unreservedly to members," AustralianSuper said.

"The fund is taking appropriate remediation actions and has self-reported the issue to the regulators."

To make good, AustralianSuper says it will contact around 100,000 impacted current and former members in the coming months to inform them of this issue and confirm the actions it is taking in response.

"AustralianSuper's aim is to return these members to the financial position they would be in now if this hadn't occurred," it said.

This may include refunding administration fees and any insurance costs deducted from impacted members' secondary account, along with lost earnings on these amounts.

According to AustralianSuper, the average payment to remediate is $650 per impacted member.

"The fund does not have to increase administration fees to pay for this, with the cost of the remediation to be paid from the fund's operational risk financial reserve," it said.

"In addition, we have strengthened our process around managing multiple accounts for all members to help ensure instances where a member has more than one account are identified, and appropriate actions are taken in a timely way."

This article first appeared on Financial Standard

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