superannuation check
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Strangely, I received a check in the mail from the Australian Tax Office, today. It's not strange in that I wasn't expecting it - I was - but that it actually arrived, which I had rather consigned to the same bin into which I've consigned things like hopes of averting war; the 'nice to have' file.
It was the 'Superannuation' money that they'd deducted from my pay while I'd been living in Australia. Superannuation is a word that seems to mean 'spanning many years', and what it means is it's the equivalent of your Canadian RRSP (which again, I think is equivalent to a 401k in the US, but I've never bothered to really find out when I see references to '401k' because it's the sort of term for which you can substitute just about anything and the only (partially) relevant content (such as jokes) still works). Anyway, the Australians had legislation that forbade the retrieval of such money by residents who'd since left the country. The logic was that the money would be managed for you until you retire to Australia.
While this may very well happen (hell, I went there on a whim for a year and a half and met some interesting people and generally enjoyed the lack of windchill and uptight Torontonians quite a bit), I think it would be irresponsible to think that the management people - who were skimming substantial management fees, and who'd thrown all of my funds into dangerous markets like the NASDAQ and the ASX - would actually leave anything by that time. So I applied to have my money released to me as soon as the legislation changed.
It took four and a half months. During that time, I'd sent emails to the management company and the Australian Tax Office - an organization that apparently was set up by the government of Australia when it didn't actually have the authority to do so, making it actually an illegal organization, but that's another story - and got no response. Then the check arrived from the management company. It was only roughly half of the money I'd put into the damn system, but given the collapse of the stock markets and the fact that the management company themselves had been nibbling at it (in the way a piranha nibbles), I guess I'm not complaining.