Almost half of the retirement fund contribution arrears reported to the regulator have been outstanding for at least five years, raising difficult questions about whether fund boards are acting quickly and persistently enough to recover members’ money.
At an Institute of Retirement Funds Africa conference panel on 8 September 2026, representatives of the Financial Sector Conduct Authority and the Office of the Pension Funds Adjudicator (OPFA) discussed how trustees can respond once employers fail to meet their obligations under section 13A of the Pension Funds Act (PFA).
Their central message was that compliance with the prescribed reporting requirements is only the beginning. Boards should understand the age and status of the arrears, communicate meaningfully with members, establish clear recovery and escalation processes, consider the available remedies, and follow matters through rather than merely noting reports of employer non-compliance.
Arrear contributions were estimated at R8 billion in February 2026. About 16 500 employers were reported to be non-compliant, affecting an estimated 590 000 members, while 44% of the outstanding arrears had remained unpaid for five years or longer.
Reporting is only the beginning
Conduct Standard 1 of 2022 (RF), which came into effect in February 2023, sets requirements related to the payment of retirement fund contributions.
Keabetswe Tsuene, a specialist analyst in the FSCA’s retirement fund conduct supervision Division, said the Conduct Standard sets out notification and reporting obligations and the applicable timeframes, including requirements to inform affected members and to report specified contraventions to the FSCA and SAPS.
But informing the FSCA that a contravention has occurred is not where the process ends. The fund must also report the action it proposes taking to recover the outstanding contributions.
Tsuene said the Conduct Standard does not tell trustees precisely what they should do to recover arrears. It is therefore up to each board to establish the systems, processes, and decision-making framework needed to move from reporting a default to pursuing the money.
She said the FSCA does not often see frameworks setting out what must happen after the prescribed reporting obligations have been met. For example, Tsuene said funds may issue 30-, 60-, and 90-day notification letters without having a clear process for what follows if an employer still fails to pay.
Similarly, a fund may enter a payment arrangement with an employer without specifying what will happen if the employer reneges.
Trustees should therefore establish trigger points for escalating a matter and deciding which recovery avenue is appropriate. Depending on the circumstances, these may include repayment arrangements, debt-collection processes, an OPFA complaint, civil proceedings, or other interventions.
Clear escalation points would also make it easier for boards to determine when an unsuccessful intervention has run its course and another approach should be considered.
Tsuene also questioned whether some funds’ communications with affected members are sufficiently meaningful. Simply telling a member that contributions for a particular month have not been paid leaves unanswered what the member is expected to do with the information.
She suggested that funds consider whether members should be encouraged to engage with their employer or be informed about other avenues available to them.
The quality of the communication matters because members may remain unaware of a contribution default until they exit the fund, try to access their savings component, become disabled, or a death benefit becomes payable.
Delay can narrow the options
One practical step trustees can take is to request an age analysis of their fund’s arrear contributions.
Tsuene said an age analysis would help a board identify arrears for which a complaint to the OPFA may be affected by the three-year time limit. It should also prompt trustees to ask why particular amounts have remained outstanding for so long, what the fund has done to recover them, and what action remains available.
She said funds sometimes approach the OPFA seeking relief covering a five-year period, only to find that part of the complaint may be affected by the three-year time limit.
Tsuene suggested that unclear policies and escalation frameworks can contribute to such delays. If a fund’s policies do not specify when an OPFA complaint should be lodged, a matter may be allowed to remain at an earlier stage of the recovery process for too long.
Nondumiso Ntshangase, a senior legal adviser at the OPFA, encouraged funds to lodge complaints promptly, pointing out that the OPFA process is free. Delaying until a complaint is affected by the time limit may leave the fund to pursue other recovery avenues outside the OPFA process.
The OPFA has introduced a dedicated form for section 13A complaints lodged by funds against non-compliant employers and responsible persons.
The form is intended to ensure that funds provide the information needed to process these complaints, reducing the need for further requests and helping complaints that qualify for expedited handling move through the process more quickly. Expedited handling remains dependent on the OPFA receiving the information required to investigate and adjudicate the complaint properly.
Read: OPFA introduces dedicated form for section 13A complaints
Ntshangase said funds should not assume that attorneys are needed to prepare lengthy submissions. Providing complete, good-quality information upfront reduces the need for the OPFA to return to the fund for further information and can assist the complaint in moving through the adjudication process.
Tsuene also said the FSCA would like to see funds take a more proactive role by lodging complaints themselves, rather than waiting until affected members approach the OPFA in their individual capacities.
Choosing and pursuing a recovery route
The panel discussed several possible recovery and enforcement avenues but did not prescribe a standard sequence that every fund should follow.
The appropriate response will depend on the circumstances. The governance issue is whether the board has considered the available options, decided which are appropriate, and established when further action should follow if the first intervention does not succeed.
Payment arrangements were identified as one area requiring closer scrutiny. Tsuene said some arrangements do not specify what will happen if the employer fails to comply. In other instances, an employer may remain on a payment arrangement even after reneging, without further action following.
Trustees should therefore know whether an arrangement is being honoured and what the next step will be if it is breached.
The panel also emphasised the importance of identifying people who may be held personally liable for section 13A non-compliance.
Ntshangase said section 13A(8) provides for responsible persons to be held personally liable in certain circumstances. The OPFA’s dedicated complaint form enables funds to identify the employer and any responsible persons against whom relief is sought.
Funds should be able to show that they requested the identity of the person responsible for section 13A compliance and should retain the employer’s response as part of the supporting documentation.
Ntshangase said an employer may identify a manager who does not fall within the category of people contemplated in section 13A(8). In such cases, the OPFA may require company information, including a Companies and Intellectual Property Commission report, to identify the directors who may need to be cited.
Accurate contact and identification details are also important because the OPFA must give the employer and any responsible persons cited in the complaint an opportunity to respond before it makes a determination.
The panel acknowledged that funds could experience difficulty when trying to lay complaints with SAPS. Tsuene said police stations have reportedly declined to open cases on jurisdictional grounds or because they regard the non-payment of contributions as a civil matter.
She asked funds that encounter these problems to inform the FSCA, including where the difficulty arose and the reason provided by SAPS. This would help the regulator identify recurring problems when engaging with its enforcement division and law-enforcement authorities.
However, an unsuccessful attempt to open a criminal case does not stop the fund’s recovery work. Criminal reporting and civil recovery are separate processes.
Ntshangase confirmed that criminal proceedings do not, by themselves, prevent a fund from pursuing the OPFA route. She noted, however, that section 30H(2) prevents the OPFA from investigating a complaint if civil proceedings concerning the same subject matter were instituted before the complaint was lodged.
A determination still requires follow-through
Ntshangase warned that obtaining a favourable OPFA determination does not complete the recovery process.
The board should establish what the adjudicator has ordered, monitor whether the employer or responsible person complies within the stipulated period, and consider enforcement if the determination is not complied with.
Under section 30O of the PFA, an adjudicator’s determination is deemed to be a civil judgment of a court that could have heard the matter and must be noted by that court’s clerk or registrar. After six weeks and provided no application under section 30P has been lodged, the clerk or registrar may issue a writ or warrant of execution for execution by the sheriff.
Ntshangase said this mechanism may enable execution against assets belonging to a party held liable under the determination.
Tsuene said a fund could have numerous determinations in its favour without enforcement necessarily following. Trustees should therefore ask not only how many determinations have been obtained, but what has happened subsequently.
Boards must actively oversee recovery
The board’s oversight responsibilities remain important where recovery work has been assigned to a service provider.
Tsuene said trustees should scrutinise the reports they receive about outsourced recovery work and consider whether service providers are doing what they are supposed to do. This requires more than receiving a monthly report recording the number of non-compliant employers or the amount outstanding.
Trustees should consider what action has been taken, what progress has been made, what is preventing further recovery, and what is supposed to happen next.
The same scrutiny should apply to payment arrangements. Boards should know whether employers are meeting their commitments and whether a breached arrangement has triggered the next step in the fund’s process.
Tsuene illustrated the broader governance concern by referring to the way some boards deal with section 13A reports in their meeting minutes.
A set of minutes may record that the board has adopted the principles of Treating Customers Fairly and is committed to fair member outcomes. Yet, when the board considers unpaid contributions, unclaimed benefits, or delayed benefit payments, the minutes may simply state that the relevant report was “noted”.
Where a fund has a pervasive arrears problem, potentially involving hundreds or thousands of non-compliant employers, merely noting the report may not demonstrate adequate oversight.
Trustees should be asking what has been done, whether the fund’s escalation process is being followed, which interventions have not succeeded, what action is required next, and whether the fund has documented evidence of its decisions and actions.
Tsuene said the FSCA distinguishes between funds where recovery is progressing slowly for reasons beyond their control and those where nothing is happening.
She said the regulator was reaching a point where it had the capability and capacity to examine whether trustees were fulfilling their duties, and that regulatory action could follow where appropriate as its supervisory work progressed.
The panel’s message was not that trustees can guarantee recovery in every case. It was that boards should be able to show what they have done once a default is identified: how quickly they acted, what recovery options they considered, what action they took, and whether they followed the matter through.
