IAPF Spring 2018 Irish Pensions Magazine

44 | IRISH PENSIONS MAGAZINE | SPRING 2018 plank of Government policy at the Dublin Chamber AGM dinner last week. We support the introduction of auto- enrolment, and have done so for a number of years. Our position paper on it is available on our website. I would like to just highlight several points we make in that paper: • Firstly, eligibility criteria should be kept simple and we should avoid imposing major payroll difficulties on Irish employers, as happened in the UK. • Secondly, we do not believe the State should take on the role of operating, as opposed to legislating for, such a scheme or schemes, simply because of the complexities of DC scheme administration. • Thirdly, there is a lot to be learnt from the many well governed and efficiently run schemes that already exist in Ireland. Some of these scheme already operate on an auto-enrolment or mandatory basis. • And finally, the scheme should not be detrimental to the very good existing funded occupational pension system which we have today in Ireland. PensionsEurope has just had another successful outcome in rolling back some of the proposed requirements in EU Regulation 2018/231 on statistical reporting requirements to the ECB by pension funds. This new reporting requirement to the ECB could have added tens of thousands of euros to the annual compliance costs of Irish Pension Schemes, if it had been enacted in its original form. PensionsEurope has succeeded in watering down a number of its requirements. Again this is the kind of unsung work in the trenches which produces real benefits for our members. Turning to the domestic front, we await the reintroduction into the Dáil of the Social Welfare, Pensions and Civil Registration Bill, which is intended to include those aforementioned protective provisions for defined benefit schemes. We also await the publication of the Government’s auto enrolment road map and proposals to reform and simplify the current pensions’ taxation system. We know that the introduction of auto enrolment is a project to which the Taoiseach is personally committed, and he again referred to it as a key ANNUAL DINNER