The Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) says it has discovered about 3,000 ghost pensioners in the Nigerian Police Pension Scheme.
Director-General of PTAD, Nellie Mayshak, made the disclosure at a two-day sensitisation workshop in Abuja on Thursday. “When PTAD was first given the police pensions payroll, it contained 18,000 pensioners which we thought were all genuine. But when we went around the states to verify, we discovered that there were 15,000 pensioners in the police,” Mayshak said.
Mayshak said by such discovery the directorate saved the Federal Government more than N100 million monthly which would have been paid to the ghost pensioners. “If we had not made this discovery, we would have been paying pension to these non-existing 3,000 pensioners,” she said.
The PTAD further disclosed that the pension board was partnering with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to ensure that pension fraudsters were eliminated in the system.
Mayshak further disclosed that PTAD was handling the payrolls of 132,000 pensioners from the civil service, parastatal agencies and the police with about 13,000 in parastatal agencies and 15,000 in the police. She advised pensioners to submit their pension records to PTAD so that it could access their liabilities and advise them appropriately.
According to her, the workshop was to sensitise stakeholders, particularly pensioners on their activities and what they were expected to do to access their entitlements seamlessly and to avoid being duped. “PTAD had sensitised pensioners through their unions, radio commercials, newspapers advertisements and SMS not to pay money to any person before their files could be processed,” she said.
By Olisemeka Obeche (with agency reports)
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