Fraud fight intensifies as FG starts verification of N/East retirees
The federal government has announced that preparations are at an advanced stage to continue the civil service verification exercise for retirees which started in 2015.
This time, the focus is on retirees in the North East region as well as those in the SouthSouth.
This was revealed by the Executive Secretary of the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD), Sharon Ikeazor, when members of the House Committee on Pension paid an oversight visit At the Directorate recently.
The verification exercise as was the case with the previous ones, would unravel ghost pensioners currently on federal government’s payroll as well as include genuine pensioners excluded from the payroll.
“PTAD continues to address the plight of pensioners who were unjustly removed from the payroll,” Ikeazor told member of the Committee. “We are determined to bring redress to these pensioners even as we continue the civil service verification.”
The Directorate said it is committed to carrying out the exercise in the North East despite insurgency in clear demonstration of its support for the federal government’s plan to rehabilitate the insurgencyravaged area.
The Directorate had from 2015 conducted the verification of the Police, Customs, Immigration and Prison Pensioners and started the verification of civil service pensioners beginning with the North-West states of Jigawa, Kano, Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina, Kaduna and Zamfara, followed by the South-East states of Enugu, Anambra, Imo, Abia and Ebonyi.
The verification exercise is still outstanding in the NorthEast, South-South, South-West and North Central.
The Chairman of the House Committee on Pension, Honorable Hassan Adamu Shekarau, expressed concern that the issue of pension has assumed an important issue in the country.
He said Nigeria would have solved the problems of pensioners when complaints ceased coming from pensioners.
Making a case for an end to incessant verification exercises, he advocated for digitalisation of all data relating to retirees even as their welfare must be priotised.
Details of previous verifications conducted by the Directorate for police as well as the Customs and Immigration services and other paramilitary bodies had been sketchy but also shocking.
The police verification exercise revealed that the actual police pension liability was less than N10 billion, contrary to the N30bn figure the Directorate inherited.
The former Executive Secretary of PTAD, Nellie Mayshak, revealed that after the verification, the Directorate started saving N1.2bn from police pension annually by weeding off 3,000 ghost pensioners.
“What used to happen was that people would take estimates of liabilities and go to the budget and actually get a lot of money released to them on the bogus estimates,” Mayshak said on how highly placed Nigerians stole pension funds.
Before Ikeazor assumed office, the Directorate had conducted the verification of Customs and Immigration services and other paramilitary bodies and the findings remained as surprising as that of police exercise.
While the issue of verification is important to the sanitisation of the database of pensioners under the Defined benefits Scheme (DBVS), there are concerns that the process is not flawless.
For instance, the current PTAD boss admitted that the Directorate reviewed over 9, 700 complaints from the North West and South East civil service verification exercise, out of which 4, 137 of the pensioners who complained will soon be added in the payroll this November.
“All outstanding benefits and arrears to these 4, 137 pensioners will commence next week,” Ikeazor said.
This indicates that the verification is not totally faultproof and should challenge the staff on duty to not only capture the data of these retirees but also pay meticulous attention to details to minimize postverification complaints.
In addition, there Nigerians are rattled that those found guilty of inflating the pension payroll and siphoning same through multiple accounts belonging to non-existent pensioners have not been identified, named and punished. While ghost pensioners remain nonexistent, the accounts in which monthly pension have been paid into belong to individuals who can easily be tracked, arrested and prosecuted.
However, the former PTAD boss, Mayshak, said she did not know those who inserted the names on the payroll.
Thankfully, recently, the Directorate inaugurated an anticorruption and transparency unit (ACTU) headed by Balewa Ndayako, a staff of the agency.
It is expected that this unit should play active role in the verification exercise to identify imposters, collaborators and corrupt individuals polluting the pension system.