Dutch pension funds are sitting on hundreds of millions of euros in unclaimed pensions, the AD said on Monday.

The three biggest Dutch pension funds – ABP (civil service), PFZW (health service) and PMT (engineering) – have between them €350m waiting to be paid to 100,000 people, the AD said.

Most of them are eventually tracked down via the social insurance bank but a large number are never traced. They are mainly people who built up pension rights for a few years and then left the country.

The civil service fund alone is looking for 19,000 people while PGGM can’t find 16,000 pensioners, the paper said. The most difficult people to trace are those who worked a few years in the 1960s or 70s, before the introduction of digital records and BSN numbers.