About 15,600 suspected ‘ghost pensioners’ have been uncovered on the pay roll of federal pensioners.
The Executive Secretary of Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate, Mrs Ikeazor Akaraiwe, disclosed this in an interview in Ado Ekiti, the Ekiti State capital, while monitoring the verification exercise for civil service pensioners under the Defined Benefit Scheme.
She said, “We have about 279,000 on our pay roll now while there are over 3000 from Ekiti State.
“We inherited the current data and we need to verify it because we have some people with either overpayment or underpayment.
“In December, we went through our database in order to sanitise it and discovered over 15,600 bank accounts without BVN. That presupposes they are ghost pensioners.”
Ikeazor said those verified in the exercise would get their papers in four months.
She added that those who could not be physically present would benefit from mobile verification.
“We will do mobile verification by going to them on their sickbeds or homes. We want to achieve a credible database so that the government would know its true liability with genuine pensioners.
“There are several of them who have been taken off payroll in the past; with this exercise, we would bring them back and pay them their arrears.”
The PTAD boss explained that the Federal Government was desirous of paying its pensioners on time, adding that the verification was vital to allow for update of records.
She said the exercise was free and stressed that participants were not expected to pay any money to be verified.
According to her, all pensioners only need to bring to the verification centres documents to prove their past employment history before retiring from service.
“All we are trying to do as a body is to mark a departure from the ways things were done in the past and to let the pensioners know that their service to fatherland is not in vain and well appreciated.
“As you can see yourself, we provided chairs and tents, including refreshment for them as against the old practice where you find pensioners queuing for hours under the sun,” she said.
