Lost Super – Do you have any?
Did you know that thousands of Australians have indirectly ‘given’ billions of dollars of their super to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO)?
When we start a new job, our employer will ask us to provide a heap of information like our address, tax file number, who to contact in the event of an emergency, bank account details and details of our super fund.
Unfortunately, our super fund and account number is not information we have readily available and sometimes we wouldn’t know where to find it. So, rather than trying to find the details, we simply allow our new employer to send their superannuation guarantee contributions off to the ‘default fund’.
We continue to work for a couple of years and then, in the interests of bettering ourselves, we change jobs. When we start the new job, we enter the same cycle with our super and end up with yet another superannuation fund. Around 40% of Australians have more than one super fund.
When superannuation becomes lost or when benefits are not claimed by members when entitled to do so and super funds are unable to contact their members, the super funds are required by law to send the accumulated savings of their ‘lost’ members to the ATO. At the end of June 2017, the ATO was holding around $16bn of lost and unclaimed super.
So, how do you go about finding your lost super?
There are a couple of ways you can do this:
1. Log on to your myGov account (if you have one) and go to the ATO section. Click on the ‘super’ tab and it will display all the super details the ATO has for you. If you don’t have a myGov account, it is easy to create one.
2. You can fill in a form and send it to the ATO to complete your search for you. This form can be found on the ATO website
3. Many superannuation funds will conduct a search for lost super for their fund members.
4. Many financial planners will also help their clients search for their lost super.
Source: Peter Kelly | Centrepoint Alliance
