COVID-19: PenCom Floats Online Portal for Retirees’Verification
The Director -General/Chief Executive, National Pension Commission (PenCom), Aisha Dahir-Umar, said the commission has developed an online enrolment application with the capabilities to register, verify and enroll prospective federal government retirees.
She said the platform will also provide guidance note to help compute retirees’ retirement benefits.
Dahir-Umar, while speaking at the opening of the Pension Desk Officers (PDOs) workshop on the online enrollment application in Abuja, said, the innovation was necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic which had limited physical contact in order to contain the spread of the virus.
She, however, expressed regrets over the inability of the commission to conduct the physical annual pre-retirement enrolment exercise due to the global impact of the pandemic.
Nonetheless, the PenCom boss reiterated the desire of the commission to ensure that the verification of pensioners is carried out in order not to affect the validation and determination of the accrued pension liabilities of the would-be retirees for the government budgetary purposes.
She was represented at the occasion by the PenCom Commissioner, Technical, Mr. Anyim Nyerere.
She said the nouveau application, which would be hosted on the commission’s website, will enable prospective retirees log on to register with their details on the Retiree Registration Module (RRM).
Dahir-Umar, pointed that the ministries, departments and agencies of government will be required to upload the list of potential retirees who have not been enrolled before as well as all employees who had retired but missed previous enrolment.
She added that the MDAs will among other things assist retirees who cannot do online registration on their own adding that the roles of the PDOs in the online exercise was critical.
She added that the workshop was particularly necessary to expose the PDOs to the newly developed online enrolment procedures for the verification of the prospective retirees.
She pointed out that it is an established norm within PenCom to conduct physical annual retirement verification and enrolment exercise on the federal government employees of the treasury funded MDAs who are scheduled for retirement within the next fiscal year.
She added that the exercise was aimed at validating and determining the retirees’ accrued pension liabilities for budgetary allocation by the federal government.