The Mines 1970 Unclaimed Benefits Preservation Pension and Provident Funds said last week it had achieved a double-digit improvement in its rate of tracing beneficiaries of unclaimed benefits.

However, historical poor record keeping during the 1970s and 1980s by the mining industry had hampered efforts to accelerate tracing even more, fund chairperson Sue Fritz said in a statement.

“This is an industrywide issue, which makes tracing the beneficiaries incredibly difficult. In addition, once we successfully find the beneficiaries and have verified them, the lack of tax numbers is a problem, but we are liaising with the South African Revenue Service on this issue,” she added.

Payment of the claims was further delayed by a lack of service records and identity documents.

This, in addition to the failure by many employers and funds to provide the proper entitlement information to employees and a failure by retirement funds to monitor compliance of administrators, was part of the many reasons more than 3.5-million people were owed around R20-billion in unclaimed benefits.

The mining industry owes about R5.2-billion to 200 000 former employees.

Despite the challenges, the Mines 1970 fund traced nearly 37% of 69 071 beneficiaries and paid out unclaimed benefits to the tune of around R24-million between January 2014 and July this year.

These comprised 11 712 pension fund beneficiaries and 57 359 provident fund beneficiaries. Nearly 13 000 of the traced beneficiaries were identified as deceased, with around 28% of the deceased beneficiaries’ dependants having been located,

compared with 2012, when just 0.5% of the beneficiaries were traced and only R5.2-million was paid out.

“We changed our previous tracing initiative from one which was very passive to one which is very active and aggressive,” said Fritz, adding that, since partnering with Alexander Forbes to deploy a new innovative tracing strategy in January 2014, a number of walk-in centres were established, along with a multilingual help desk.

The Financial Services Board pleaded last week for funds to “take all reasonable steps” to trace members and beneficiaries who remained untraced and pay the millions of rands owed to them.