were struggling to pay bills and buy food<\/a> because delays at the pension scheme \u2013 contracted out to Capita \u2013 had left them without an income for months.<\/p>\nIn a stock exchange update, Capita said that getting service levels at the pension scheme up to scratch would come at a price. It pointed to extra staff costs as well as penalties for missed targets. Taken together, this would wipe between \u00a325m and \u00a340m off annual profits, the outsourcing company said. The warning sent its shares down nearly 21%.<\/p>\n
Hernandez said: \u201cWe recognise the service on the civil service pension scheme has not been good enough, we are working closely with the Cabinet Office on all aspects of the scheme, and this remains our number one priority.\u201d<\/p>\n
The government has withheld nearly \u00a310m from Capita because of service shortfalls and the company is facing mounting calls to be stripped of the contract. More than 6,700 quotations for past retirement dates and 4,100 bereavement cases were outstanding at the end of last month.<\/p>\n
Angela MacDonald, the HMRC deputy chief executive leading a taskforce to clear the backlog, told the Commons public accounts committee that the bill for the work done by civil servants parachuted in to help would be \u00a312.5m.<\/p>\n
Nick Thomas-Symonds, the paymaster general, told MPs the government intended to \u201crecover every single penny of cost\u201d from Capita. \u201cI will not have a situation where public money is funding corporate failing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
When the extent of the problems at the scheme became clear, the government started offering interest-free \u201chardship loans\u201d to the worst-affected people. MacDonald told the hearing that \u00a315.6m had been lent to 2,700 members awaiting payments.<\/p>\n
Catherine McKinnell, who is a Labour member of the accounts committee, told the hearing of a terminally ill pensioner who had been waiting for a quote since January. She said they had died at the weekend still without receiving the information.<\/p>\n
A trio of Capita executives told the committee that the scheme, which has 1.7m members, had extremely complex rules and the processing of cases was being slowed down by missing data.<\/p>\n
With government contracts key to the Capita business, Richard Holroyd, chief executive of its public service division, said he had considered resigning but decided against walking away because it would have left colleagues without the support they needed.<\/p>\n
The extra money being thrown at the pension scheme debacle meant the company was making a loss on the contract, Holroyd said. But he added: \u201cWe can\u2019t think about profitability \u2026 this is about restoring the service and rebuilding trust.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Capita has revealed that the bill for cleaning up its mess at the crisis-hit civil service pension scheme…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":533406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[114,268,85,46,266,267],"class_list":["post-533405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-business","tag-finance","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=533405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/533406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=533405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=533405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=533405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}