Complaints to the SCT dropped from 2,619 in 2012 to 2,444 for the year ending 30 June 2013, SCT chair Jocelyn Furlan told InvestorDaily.
This follows a 6.5 per cent increase in complaints for the 2012 financial year, which Ms Furlan linked to a rise in baby boomer super account balances.
The 2013 decrease in overall complaints is likely due to improved investment returns, Ms Furlan said.
“When investment returns are good, people don’t complain about delays in rollovers and delays in switches and those kind of things because their benefits are still improving,” she said.
Death benefit complaints also dropped for 2013 by 12.7 per cent to 390. However, it remains the SCT’s single largest area of complaints.
Peter Townsend, principal at Townsends Business and Corporate Lawyers, told InvestorDaily an “almost universal” misunderstanding in relation to estate division is that super does not normally form part of an estate.
“If you ask a member [or] trustee how they deal with their superannuation assets, 99.5 per cent would say ‘do it through your will’, but that’s not quite right,” Mr Townsend said.
“That’s not to say you can’t deal with those proceeds through the will; you can, but only after you get those proceeds into the will in the first place,” he added.
