Cbus ordered to pay $23.5 million over death and disability claim delays: what it means for your own claim

The Federal Court has ordered United Super, the trustee of the construction industry fund Cbus, to pay a $23.5 million penalty over serious failures in how it processed death benefit and total and permanent disability (TPD) insurance claims. More than 7,000 people were affected while grieving a death or living with a serious injury. The trustee admitted the contraventions and the Court made declarations against it. Source: Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) media release 25-286MR, 25 November 2025; ASIC v United Super Pty Ltd [2025] FCA 1453.

This article was first published on 2 December 2025.

What the Court found

Cbus admitted it caused unreasonable delays in processing death benefit and TPD claims, and admitted breaching the Corporations Act. According to ASIC (the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, the corporate regulator), between 27 March and 1 May 2023 between 48% and 56% of the fund's open death claims, and between 38% and 43% of its open TPD claims, had been sitting for more than 365 days.

The trustee had outsourced its claims handling to an external administrator, Australian Administration Service Pty Limited, between October 2022 and November 2024, and then failed to monitor that administrator properly. ASIC says that from at least November 2022, United Super's own executive and board committees were aware that the administrator had not met its agreed service levels on claims processing.

The Court declared that Cbus contravened the Corporations Act by failing to take all reasonable steps to ensure claims were processed within a reasonable period, failing to hold accurate and complete data on the volume and age of claims, failing to ensure its own committees had sufficient oversight of the problem, and failing to adequately monitor and manage the administrator's performance. It contravened the Act on two further occasions by failing to report the matters to ASIC within the required timeframe: reports due on 3 March and 20 July 2023 were not lodged until 5 August 2023.

ASIC Deputy Chair Sarah Court said the delays caused real and avoidable harm to thousands of Australians. Her message to the wider industry was blunt: "You cannot outsource your obligations to your members."

The penalty, and the compensation on top of it

The $23.5 million penalty is separate from what affected people receive. Cbus is also running its own remediation program paying approximately $32 million to an estimated 7,402 affected claimants and members for lost earnings and wrongly charged fees, per the ASIC release. ASIC notes the penalty exceeds the $18.5 million in revenue United Super declared for the 2024 financial year. The trustee was also ordered to pay half a million dollars towards ASIC's legal costs and to undertake a compliance program.

Why this matters beyond Cbus

Death and TPD benefits are often the money a family relies on after losing an income earner, or when someone can no longer work because of illness or injury. Delays land at the worst possible time.

The detail worth sitting with is this: these were not people who lacked cover, or whose claims were refused. Their claims were in the system. The system just did not move. That is the pattern regulators keep finding across the industry, and it is why knowing where your claim actually sits matters as much as having a claim at all.

If you have a claim in with any fund

None of this tells you anything about your own claim. But it may be worth a closer look if:

• a death benefit or TPD claim has been open for several months with little visible progress
• you are not sure what stage the claim is at, or who is actually assessing it
• you are facing financial hardship while you wait
• you are not sure whether a loved one's super even included insurance. Many accounts carry default cover that members never knew about, and the fund can tell you.

Some things that can help. You can ask the fund, in writing, what stage the claim is at and what is outstanding. A record of every form, call and email makes any later complaint easier. If a claim stalls, you can complain to the fund itself, and if that does not resolve it, you can escalate to AFCA (the Australian Financial Complaints Authority), the free external dispute body for superannuation and insurance complaints.

If you want to talk any of this through, we'll explain which doors exist for your situation and, if you want, introduce you to a firm on our panel. It costs you nothing.