DETAILS of how the Cross River Stat Government recovered 26 million Naira between 2012 and 2013 through the Electronic payment of pensioners introduced by the State Pensions Board, have emerged.
While N17 million was recovered in 2012, N9 million was recovered in payments made in the first half of 2013.
Governor Liyel Imoke recently during a State Executive Council, SEC, meeting hinted of massive pensions payment fraud.

Mr. John Adie, Director of the State Pensions Board was quoted as saying that in 2012, the office came up with the new method of paying pensioners in the state through the e- payment system; a process where the accounts of the pensioners were credited without cheques being lodged into the accounts of the pensioners in banks across the state.
“In the past, our staff would have to travel to all parts of the state to deposit checks in banks for subsequent crediting of each pensioners account but in 2012 we came up with the idea of paying the pensioners electronically through their banks here in Calabar”.
Mr. Adie said it was in the process of the e-payment that it was discovered that some pensioners had more than one account into which cheques were paid, this discovery led to the recovery of huge sums of money.
“The e-payment made it impossible for one pensioner to be credited twice so some payments bounced back but for the avoidance of doubt, we kept releasing monies to those accounts for three months and when nobody came forward to make any claims, we knew that those accounts were phony so we had to stop releasing money to them and went ahead to recoup the monies in the banks which gave us the figure we had as recovered funds”.

According to him, some pensioners perfected the act whereby their children were also signatories to their account such that when the “Father passes on, the son automatically begins to sign and collect the pension from the bank but we have checkmated all those illegalities that is why some people are fighting us to bring in their own persons to continue their past deals”.

The Director of the State Pensions Board  explained that the Board had carried out reforms by down loading the files of all pensioners into a data base in the board’s website to enable pensioners have access to their files from anywhere they chose without having to travel to Calabar, saying “This is the first state pensions board in the whole country to activate this method of electronic filing system to give every pensioner whose file is with us free and easy access to his or her file. The board receives a monthly contribution of N180 million monthly which translates to N10 million monthly from each of the 18 local government areas. But after the payment of pension, not much is left for the payment of gratuity so we have to devise a means of sharing the money available amongst the several people who are due for gratuity”.
“The Pension Office does not originate any file for payment but the local government councils who know who their retired teachers or employees are. We also insisted that all the files must go through the Local Government Service Commission for their authentication before any action is taken by the Pensions Board and after that the Auditor General has to confirm the figures computed for each pensioner”.