Uche Usim, Abuja
The yuletide season was lit for pensioners of the defunct NITEL/Mtel as the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) paid one month pension arrears of N842,808,921.52 to 11,331 of them.
The payment was made to the pensioners in December 2019, as part of the Federal Government’s commitment to reduce inherited pension liabilities.
The Executive Secretary, Dr Chioma Ejikeme who made the disclosure in a statement also assured pensioners nationwide that their welfare remains a priority to President Muhammadu Buhari.
Meanwhile, the directorate has successfully completed its nationwide field verification exercise for federal government pensioners under the Defined Benefit Scheme (DBS).
The exercise, which took place across the six geo-political zones of the country, achieved a twin objective of simplifying the process of getting the retirees electronically captured on the database of PTAD and weeding out ghost pensioners among them.
However, those not enrolled during the field exercise can now visit any PTAD office nearest to them to do so.
More so, mobile verification is also available for pensioners who were too old or sick to come out for the general verification.
For pensioners in the diaspora, there is a register to collate their details pending when they return to Nigeria for their physical verification.
While the database and the payroll system of PTAD are being sanitized, Ejikeme said a new phase of verification, tagged ‘I’m alive project’ has commenced.
It entails the regular screening of pensioners at PTAD offices across the country, with a view to detecting and removing from its payroll, those that may have died after the field verification exercise.
The new initiative is also a catalyst that ensures pensioners or their next of kin, get their entitlements as and when due.
The Executive Secretary also said that the recent Biometric Verification Number (BVN) revalidation exercise conducted in collaboration with the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) was to remove from the payroll pensioners whose accounts are not NUBAN compliant; or that the bank does not exist or those whose payments continuously failed from August to October 2019. Others yanked off are those with duplicate BVN or no BVN at all.