This is the final of the three month view of how things could and have worked out for England playing in the World Cup. At first we felt that the future ahead was bright as both the England games and our pension audit were at the Planning stage and our June newsletter gave 3 tips for success and three articles to read. In the July newsletter our thinking moved to Disappointment as England failed to meet expectations and perhaps your own Audit fieldwork stage stuttered and lost momentum.

In August, our thinking for both England, and perhaps for our pension audit too, is Strategic Thinking - to learn what is missing, what went wrong and what action we should take to tackle the underlying problems. Even great Champions like Tiger Woods look at their game and say it’s not good enough. You have to look at the key elements of your business and for most trustees that includes your advisers.

A three part solution could be:

• Agree on who performed as they promised and who did not
• Decide on which people to keep on board and replace those you don’t want to keep
• Look around to find the best people to take up vacant positions

To help you review your own auditor’s performance, take a look at this download to inspire you, provided at no cost to you:
Ash Shaw’s 20 Minute Auditor Health Check

If you would like a hard copy sent to you or have any queries, please contact one of your Ash Shaw team or email Sally Tasker.

We announced that 2010 was to be a year where The Pensions Regulator (TPR) would take action to improve standards of governance and administration. Our March newsletter reported record-keeping proposals. Earlier this summer, in June, the Regulator published its updated guidance on record-keeping.

Some of the reasons for this drive for betterment are the need to get ready for the start of 2012 Pension Reform automatic enrolment and contribution deduction, and to ensure that the processes for pension schemes in wind-up are completed more timely and cost-effectively.

A record-keeping review should be one of your top pension scheme agenda items at the next trustee meeting. The Regulator makes the point that poor data can lead to significant additional costs such as administration, error correction, and claims from members, buy-outs, wind-ups and may necessitate more conservative actuarial assumptions. An often used figure is that poor data can cause a variation of up to 5% on scheme liabilities – that is £50,000 for every £1 million of scheme assets.

We have selected for your meeting 10 of the points the Regulator wants trustees to be aware of to help you think ahead:

1. By December 2012 TPR expects all schemes to have measured their scheme data and fulfilled these targets: presence of common data of 100% for new data created in and after June 2010 and 95% for legacy data created before June 2010 (intro p2of19, p5of19)
2. Record-keeping testing is part of the risk assessment process and provides an indication of the effectiveness in meeting legal requirements to have adequate internal controls (intro p3of19)
3. Educational materials are available for trustees in ‘bite-size’ learning materials and updated Trustee Toolkit (intro p3of19)
4. The principles of good record-keeping apply to all work-based schemes including pension contract-based schemes (para 3,p3of19)
5. Each scheme should consider whether they require their own scheme-specific conditional data (para 17, p6of19)
6. Helpful numerical information should be made available to trustees to supplement the basic scheme membership numbers which are frequently reported (para 49,p10of19)
7. Administrators and providers should develop their own reporting formats to reflect their style (para 52,p12of19)
8. Where action indicate further investigation or data improvement is needed, action plans should be developed to address gaps and weaknesses according to the risks involved (para56, p12of19)
9. The Regulator will take enforcement action where there is evidence that record-keeping problems are so severe as to indicate a failure to maintain adequate internal controls (para65, p14of19)
10. There are special internal control considerations for DC processing such as switching, lifestyling, DC roll-up and contribution records (appendix 2, pp16-17of19)

Please email Sally Tasker should you wish to tell our readers how you are taking on board the actions required by the Regulator, or contribute an article to our next issue.

We continue to receive a fantastic response from clients and their advisers to our offer of free client advice on accounting, audit and assurance , so we’ve decided to help our Ash Shaw community help each other.

If you need help and advice, please contact us in the normal way or post your question on the Ash Shaw Discussion Group on LinkedIn. Be assured, we will consider each and every discussion individually and if we don’t know the answer, we will engage other trustees and professionals who have the relevant experience (whilst of course keeping your details private should you prefer this).

We’ve started the discussion group off, by using the Heard at Focus groups’ questions and would welcome your thoughts.

If you are not yet a member of our Linked In group, please click the link and you can request to join the group. Sally Tasker will approve your request and then you start contributing to our discussions. Join Ash Shaw’s Linked In group. We look forward to hearing from you.

To help us help you more swiftly, please send us a brief description of your situation (or a copy of last year's signed accounts if you are looking for new auditors) to Sally Tasker and let us know when would be a convenient time to call you.

If someone else has sent you this web link, why not make sure you get your own copy in future? Sign up to Ash Shaw's free monthly email newsletters and receive the latest information, news, ideas and advice. Focused on small- and medium sized pension schemes, these mailings tell exactly what you need to know, without wasting your valuable time. Sign up now.