The dominant provider of municipal pensions in Norway has apologised for an error that left around around one hundred pensioners in its scheme being underpaid for years – some of them died before being compensated.
Norwegian national broadcaster NRK yesterday reported that retired nurse, 80-year-old Lillian Christensen, had been surprised to receive a bank transfer of NOK225,000 (€20,520) on 1 February from KLP, which turned out to be a correction of 13 years of underpayments from her public service pension.
According to details in the news report, which KLP confirmed, around 100 people are now due to receive delayed pension payments from KLP, and that the list also includes deceased people.
Tore Skeide, director of pension settlement at KLP, told IPE: “I understand that this pensioner has been surprised to receive a large amount into her account. I think we all would have been.
“What has happened in this case is that KLP has made a human error, and we apologise for that,” he said.
“We discovered this error through our control systems and it has now been corrected,” Skeide said.
Although Christensen was quoted by NRK as saying she had never noticed over the years that she had been receiving too little pension, she also said that – had she not been living with her husband – the missing money would have meant a lot to her.
KLP told NRK that in cases where underpaid pensioners had since died, what KLP owed would be paid to heirs and estates as far as possible.
Skeide said in the report that including late-payment interest, the amounts owed to pensioners ranged from couple of thousand kroner up to half a million kroner.
Explaining the mistake KLP made, he said that for some people, the regulations around how an accrued pension was to be treated were different.
“What has happened in these cases is that we have treated the pension rights before 1967 and after 1967 in the same way, and so the pension was too low,” he said in NRK’s report.
He told the broadcaster that KLP was now examining its routines to look for problems to prevent such mistakes from happening again.
KLP’s pensions business managed NOK720.8bn at the end of September 2022.
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