I'd argue that it is a crazy bureaucratic maze, but we agree on the specifics of the change. Shared liability was a fairly simple way for small employers to ke

I'd argue that it is a crazy bureaucratic maze, but we agree on the specifics of the change. Shared liability was a fairly simple way for small employers to keep their workers taken care of even if specific businesses failed. Its existence, along with the existence of unincorporated business owners, was missed or ignored when Section 75 was put into place. And the oversight wasn't corrected in 2005 when the rules were revised. More damningly, the rules were revised seemingly without consideration for the difficulty of back-filling forty years of contributions to an entirely new threshold. Section 75 came about because of outright theft, and was revised in response to employers promising pensions out of line with what they were actually investing, but it wasn't targeted towards those cases. Instead, it created a liability for employers who'd been adequately funding pension schemes for decades, based on a calculation they'd never planned to support. And if the pension funds don't play along, they incur fines which could actually make healthy funds insolvent! So a change aimed at addressing theft from pensions has created a situation where either employers are bankrupted for offering pensions to employees, or healthy, honest pension funds become unable to pay full benefits. I won't allege malice, but it's fairly spectacular incompetence to write a law supporting pensions which actually endangers people's pensions.