Receive Your Supplementary Pension Without Worries and Red Tape

When you stop working, you should be able to enjoy your retirement to the full. Your supplementary pension should also be paid easily and correctly as soon as you retire. Sigedis removes a lot of the red tape by simplifying the payment of your supplementary pension.

Pensions minister Karine Lalieux and Sigedis therefore present five key steps that have been taken to ensure that everything you have accrued is also paid out quickly and smoothly.

More than 4.2 million employees and self-employed people are members of a pension plan through their employment. A total of 76% of the working population will therefore receive a supplementary pension on retirement - on top of their statutory pension. However, it is not always easy to actually get that pension paid out.

What are the solutions?

These five improvements will help to make sure your supplementary pension is paid correctly and quickly:

1. Clear, reliable information about your supplementary pension

People have already been able to track down their own 'forgotten' entitlements via mypension.be since 2016. This has been a single place where they were able to find out about the job in which they accrued entitlements, where those entitlements are and how much they will get. In addition, Sigedis also sends out an annual update of their supplementary pensions record to all members.

Since June last year, mypension.be has offered even more targeted information. Mypension.be makes affiliates aware of the impact of early retirement on the net supplementary pension. People applying for their pension before reaching legal retirement age will be warned that tax deductions on their supplementary pension may be higher. Thus, mypension.be ensures that you are able to make well-informed and properly thought-through choices about your future.

2. Pension institutions receive automatic updates

Since 2017, Sigedis has been providing insurers and pension funds with up-to-date information about all their members (both active and dormant). Sigedis not only notifies the pension institution when a member moves house or marries, but also when they retire or die.

Thus, the pension institution is informed automatically and the procedure for paying out the supplementary pension can be initiated. That means you no longer have to search for proof of your own statutory retirement and provide it to the pension institution that manages your supplementary pension; Sigedis now does this for you.

3. Choose to disclose your account number once only

To make payments even smoother, Sigedis not only provides a report of death and retirement to your pension institution, but also other information needed for the payment. Since last year, people applying for their statutory pension can specify that their account number can also be used to pay their supplementary pension. That account number is then automatically forwarded to the pension institution responsible for paying the supplementary pension.

You can give your account number once, in a single place, and choose to have all your pension payments deposited into it. This means less administration and faster payment of your supplementary pension.

4. Getting the right taxes paid on your supplementary pension immediately

When making the payment, the pension institution deducts taxes and social security contributions from the supplementary pension. The amount of this tax depends on when the pension is paid out. People who do not retire until they reach the legal retirement age or until they have worked a full career and continue working until that time will benefit from a more advantageous tax rate.

Applying the correct tax rate to your supplementary pension does require some certifications. Collecting all these and delivering them to your insurer or pension fund involves a lot of red tape. This is despite the fact that most of this information is already available in government databases.

Sigedis therefore ensures more efficient coordination of the necessary data between social security institutions and automatically delivers the necessary information to your pension institution. This allows it to apply the correct tax rate immediately when paying out your supplementary pension. We are sending you the “full career” certificate today, and the indication that you have continued to work will also follow later this year.

5. Faster payment to your beneficiaries on death

A supplementary pension plan may also provide death cover. Your beneficiaries (e.g. your partner or children) will then receive a payment if you die before retirement. Your beneficiaries are often unaware of this. Even pension institutions cannot always find out which beneficiaries should receive the payment.

That is why Sigedis has made available an online tool for insurers and pension funds. They can now easily look up who the beneficiaries of a death cover are in most situations when a member dies. These are the categories commonly found in beneficiary clauses such as partner, (grand)children, (grand)parents and siblings. Through this service, Sigedis facilitates the payment of death benefits by the pensions institution.