By Ola Ajayi, Ibadan

Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate, PTAD, has explained how it has been able to check fraud in pensions of retirees under the Defined Pension Scheme, DPS, since it was established a year ago.

Director-General of PTAD, Nellie Mayshak, at a sensitization workshop on pension management, said the monthly payroll was always submitted to the office of the Accountant-General of the Federation for direct payment from budgetary allocations maintained with the CBN’s bank accounts.

“The Central Bank of Nigeria is now handling your money. Our duty at the PTAD is just to prepare data that will be submitted to CBN. We don’t touch your money. It is the CBN that will pay the money to your banks while your banks will credit your accounts.

Apart from this, we always monitor the payment from the CBN to different banks and till the banks remit the money to your account.

So FG really means that your money will not be lost in transit again and I want to appeal to you to beware of the activities and antics of some unscrupulous elements in our society, capitalizing on the hitherto bad system to swindle you of your hard-earned money.

“Beware of 419 that always send messages to you that your file is before them, now ready for processing, but that you must send certain amount of money to ensure the processing, we are not part of such; because we are not hungry, we are being decently paid.

We are quite aware that some are selling complaint forms to you at N1, 000, this is very wrong. We are giving out complaint form free of charge; it is fraudulent for anybody to collect money on it from you.

We have made arrangements with EFCC, anybody who is caught will be prosecuted, enough of 419, we are encouraging you too to report anybody who asks you to bring money to the appropriate security operatives for adequate arrest and prosecution.”

PTAD assured all the pensioners who came from states in the South West of prompt payment of their pensions without going through unnecessary rigour.

The workshop had in attendance members of the Nigeria Union of Pensioners, NUP, police pensioners, civil servants, customs, immigration, underwriters and others from government parastatals.

Mayshak further explained that Government Integrated Financial Management Information System, GIFMIS, had improved monthly electronically payment of pension to the respective beneficiaries without any form of fraudulent act.

She stressed that the agency had also restored payment of monthly pension to genuine pensioners who had hitherto been removed from payroll.

According to her, the agency had successfully conducted a mini-verification of some categories of police and civil service pensioners and had placed them on payroll.

In the paper entitled, ‘Role and Mandate of PTAD’ which she presented, she said the Federal Government was never happy about the ways and manners billions of Naira was handled, hence the establishment of PTAD under the Federal Ministry of Finance.

Proper investigation

She hinted that it was part of the mandate of the directorate to ensure that those pensioners that their names were omitted within the last two to five years were included after proper investigation.

She said, “the directorate has been tackling reported cases of fraud in collaboration with the pensioners unions and agencies such as EFCC, and we have a zero tolerance for corruption.”

“There has not been a single incident of misappropriation of pension funds since PTAD took over and there will be none, ” she stressed.

Challenges of the agency include lack of adequate awareness by some concerned stakeholders about the agency; wrong impression about PTAD by some pensioners and critical stakeholder; huge pension liabilities including resistance to change and absence of credible database as some of the challenges confronting the agency in the last one year.

The National President of theNigeria Union of Pensioners, Mr. Abel Afolayan gave kudos to PTAD for approval of 33per cent pension increase by federal government and reversal of hitherto problematic payment of pensions by banks.