Directorate commences verification for civil service pensioners in South East

The Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) has moved its train to the South East Zone for the nationwide verification of Civil Service Pensioners.

In a statement released yesterday, Dec 7, by the Directorate, South East Zone verification exercise started on Monday, November 30, 2015 and will be on till Saturday, December 12, 2015. This covers pensioners in Abia, Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo and Anambra.

The verification which started in the North West Zone of the country, commenced the exercise for all pensioners in 2014, with the Police Pensioners from December 2014 to May, 2015 being the first group to be verified.

The verification of Police, Customs, Immigration and Prison pensioners enabled PTAD to identify and remove over 3,000 bogus names from the payroll, which in effect saved the Federal Government about N100 Million monthly in fraudulent pension payments.

It also restored 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.

READ: PTAD discovers 3,000 ghost pensioners in police pension scheme

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.

The Directorate is made up of the four pension offices; The Civil Service Pension, The Police Pension, The Customs, Immigration and Prisons Pension, and The Treasury Funded Parastatals Pension.