Nigeria Saved N100m Monthly From Fraudulent Pension Payments – PTAD Boss

The Nigerian government has been saved N100 million monthly that could have gone to fraudulent pension payments, the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate said on Tuesday.
Speaking when PTAD berthed in Abakaliki, the Ebonyi State capital, for the ongoing nationwide verification exercise of Civil Service Pensioners, the Director-General of the directorate, Nellie Mayshak, explained that the objective of the verification exercises was to establish a credible, authentic and digitalized database of pensioners under the Defined Benefit Scheme.

This is in addition to the objective of eliminating duplicate payments and identifying 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”, Mr. Mayshak disclosed.

The PTAD boss added that pensioners who were not receiving their pension prior to the establishment of the directorate, can now be paid.