Nationwide verification for civil service pensioners begins

Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) has commenced verification for Civil Service Pensioners nationwide. This was made known in a statement released by the management of the directorate.

The verification exercise which kicked off on Monday November 2, 2015, covered pensioners in the North West Zone of the country, including Jigawa, Kano, Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina, Kaduna and Zamfara States.

The North West Zone verification exercise will end on November 14, 2015, and then move on to the South East Zone covering Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyi, Abia and Imo states from November 30 – December 12, 2015.

For the North East, South West, South South and North Central, verification will hold in the first quarter of 2016.

PTAD is 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.

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PTAD comprises of four pension offices; The Civil Service Pension, The Police Pension, The Customs, Immigration and Prisons Pension, and The Treasury Funded Parastatals Pension.

The verification of all pensioners commenced in 2014. The first group to be verified was the Police Pensioners from December 2014 to May, 2015, followed by the Customs, Immigration and Prisons Pensioners, Parastatal Pensioners from July to August 2015.

According to the Directorate, the objectives for verification includes; establishing a credible, authentic and digitalized database of pensioners under the Defined Benefit Schem (DBS). It is also to eliminate duplicate payments and ghost workers. This will go a long way in regularising anomalies such as over payments and under payments. The excercise also helps update the records of the Next Of Kin (NOK).

The successful completion of the nationwide biometric verification of Police, Customs, Immigration and Prison Pensioners, has so far identified and removed over 3,000 bogus names from the payroll. This has in effect saved the Federal Government about N100 Million monthly in fraudulent pension payments.

It has also helped 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.

The continuous database clean-up process also ensures that pensioners who were not receiving their pensions prior to the establishment of PTAD, can now be paid as every kobo saved is ploughed back into the system.