We’ve blocked fraud, saved Nigeria N100m monthly – Pension body

The Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate on Tuesday said it saved the Nigerian Government about N100 Million monthly in fraudulent pension payments.

The director general of the directorate, Nellie Mayshak, made this known during the Abakaliki leg of the ongoing nationwide verification exercise of Civil Service Pensioners.

He said the objective of the verification exercises was to establish a credible, authentic and digitalized database of pensioners under the Defined Benefit Scheme.

He also explained that the aim was to eliminate duplicate payments and fish-out ghost workers.

“PTAD is as a Directorate under the Federal Ministry of Finance established in August 2013 in compliance with the provisions of section 30 sub-section (2) (a) of the Pension Reform Act of 2004 and as restated in section 42(1) of the amended act of 2014 to manage the old pension scheme (Defined Benefit Schemes –DBS) for pensioners who retired on or before June 2007 and did not transit to the new contributory Scheme.

“With the successful completion of the nationwide biometric verification of Police, Customs, Immigration and Prison Pensioners, PTAD was able to Identify and remove over 3,000 bogus names from the payroll. This has in effect saved the Federal Government about N100 Million monthly in fraudulent pension payments.

“We are able to restore monthly pension payments to genuine pensioners previously removed from the payroll, including 750 Pensioners (made up of 529 regular police retirees and 221 Next of Kin (NOKs) who had never been paid any pension or gratuity, some for over 10 years after retirement,’’ he disclosed.

Mr. Mayshak said pensioners who were not receiving their pension prior to the establishment of PTAD, can now be paid.