PTAD to Conducts Verification for Police Pensioners

The Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) has concluded arrangement to conduct a supplementary verification exercise for all unverified police pensioners who retired on or before June 2007.

The exercise takes effect from Monday, May 25 to June 1, 2015 in Abuja. The affected pensioners did not participate in an earlier nationwide verification exercise concluded in March 2015.

The supplementary exercise, according to a statement from the agency, is coming on the heels of post verification analysis which revealed that 3,326 police pensioners on PTAD’s payroll did not turn up to be captured.

This, it stated prompted the removal of the names of the unverified police pensioners from PTAD’s payroll and payment of their pensions suspended as from May 1, 2015 pending the outcome of the supplementary exercise.

“The names of the affected unverified police pensioners numbering 3,326 have been removed from our payroll due to their non-participation in its just concluded nationwide verification exercise and will only be reinstated after they have been duly verified and their biometrics captured,” a statement from PTAD said, adding that the supplementary verification exercise is the last call for the affected pensioners to come out and be captured,” it added.

Throwing more light on why it removed the names of those affected from the payroll, it explained: “The removal of unverified police pensioners from PTAD’s payroll is to clean up and give credibility to our police pensioners’ database after a nationwide verification, which the affected pensioners did not turn up to be captured,” adding further that the removal of the affected names as well as the call for supplementary verification was necessary to ensure pension is paid to genuine pensioners only.

“The question is how long are we supposed to pay this group of people who have not turned up to be captured after repeated calls for them to do so?”

According to the agency, between December 2014 and March 2015, PTAD went to all the geo-political zones to verify and capture all police pensioners. The exercise was conducted in 18 cities across the country with adequate publicity on national radio, television and print media as well as SMS messages to the targeted pensioners.