A saver has seen his Aviva personal pension value drop by hundreds of thousands after charges appeared to be wrongly applied to his account.
John Thompson, founder of the journalist resource and training website Journalism.co.uk, had been checking the value of his pension fund using the Aviva app when he saw the discrepancy.
Thompson told FT Adviser he was shocked to find the value of his pension had been reduced by 90 per cent.
He said: “I also went online to the Aviva website to double check, and saw that the same reduced value was also showing.”
Thompson called Aviva and said he was taken aback when the customer service assistant laughed.
“He did take a few hours getting back to me and confirmed that through checks Aviva completes on a regular basis it had noticed that the annual fund charge on my pension plan had in some cases gone over one per cent.”
An email from Aviva customer service told Thompson the provider had been correcting his pension valuation when Thompson noticed the error.
Aviva apologised for not letting Thompson know they were carrying out the work and said it had logged his concerns as a complaint which it would escalate for further investigation.
Thompson said: “I understood Aviva spent £61mn on a software update recently.
“It seems likely that if charges were misapplied to my pension, then others would have been affected as well.
“I have requested that Aviva provide me with documentary evidence of when exactly charges were misapplied, the amounts involved and what, if any, compensation has been applied to my account as a consequence and whether that was just interest or was based on how that money would have performed had it remained in my pension.
“My gut feeling is that Aviva is a bit rattled by my experience and there is a bigger story behind this.”
“I have a public profile through my company and have the resources to chase this up. I’m wondering if other people have had the wrong charges applied to their pension and know nothing about it."
A spokesperson for Aviva said the incident was an isolated one.
They added: “As part of our ongoing product reviews we found that some of the charges applied on Mr Thompson’s policy were higher than they should have been.
"Having identified this, we took immediate action to correct it. This meant that the figures were showing as incorrect when he logged into his account last week as we were in the process of updating his policy at the time. This was an isolated incident.
“We’ve spoken to Mr Thompson and apologised for the distress caused. We’ve also assured him that this has now been fully resolved and the corrections have been applied to his account.
"We are writing to Mr Thompson to explain and have logged this as a formal complaint.”
Samantha Downes is a freelance journalist.
