Directorate Unearths 15,357 Fictitious Pensioners
Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) has said in Lagos that no fewer than 15,357 people were collecting pensions illegally within the Federal Government’s agencies.
Its Director, Parastatals Pension Department, Kabiru Yusuf, disclosed on the sideline of a one-day training for journalists covering pensions.
The directorate was established by the Federal Government in August 2013 in compliance with the provisions of the repealed Pension Reform Act (PRA) of 2004.
Its establishment was necessitated by the need to reform the old pension’s offices under the defined benefit scheme which was bedevilled by myriad problems.
Yusuf noted that while reviewing the number of pensioners on its payroll in the last quarter of 2020, saying that there were 120,000 of them prior to the call for verification.
The director stressed that following the verification, the directorate discovered that 20,191 of these pensioners could not be found on the PTAD verification data base but were on the payroll.
Yusuf explained: “After a lot of due diligence, we decided to remove them from the payroll in the belief that if they were genuine pensioners, they would come out to present themselves.
“We established a robust complaint management system and notified the pensions commission, our regulator, the National Assembly and agencies, where the pensioners claimed to have worked.’’
He noted that only 4,834 of the affected pensioners went through the process of the complaint management to present themselves for verification and they were restored on the payroll.
Yusuf explained that some other cases caused by errors were corrected and the affected persons were also restored to the payroll.
He said: “Up till now, we have close to 16,000 pensioners unaccounted for and unless anyone comes out with valid identification, they are people who have been collecting pensions illegally.’’
He said that he could not name the amount of money the directorate was able to save from ending the illegality, but that in 2016, during the directorate’s initiative to validate BVN of pensioners, it saved up to N7 billion.
Yusuf noted that the initiative was geared towards bringing integrity and validity to the data base in place.
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