Military pension seeks PTAD partnership

By Ene Osang

Abuja

The Nigerian military has sought the collaboration of Pension Transition Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) to effectively handle its pension administration.
Chairman, Military Pensions Board, Brig.- Gen Adekunle Adigun Adesope, who led a delegation on a courtesy visit to the headquarters of PTAD yesterday in Abuja said the military was saddled with challenges in pension administration.
According to Adesope, the military pensions board had long migrated from manual collation of data of its pensioners to a computerised system, regretting however that it still faced challenges particularly in making payments in error and retrieving such funds.
“The essence of our visit is to exchange ideas so that together we can have a common ground in resolving challenges of pension administration which we are saddled with.
“Most fundamental is how to safeguard the integrity of our data base bearing in mind that before the advent of computer we had been doing manual data collation. We have however migrated to computerised system but that notwithstanding, we have inherited data and if errors have been imputed it becomes difficult to eliminate.
“We discovered that there is a high level of dishonesty and unless verification is conducted you cannot clean up the data base and so we want to leverage on your experiences and add it up with ours to see how we can better the lives of our pensioners,” he said.
Awosope maintained that the issue of recovering payments made erroneously to pensioners is a challenge, adding that many dead pensioners have been paid in error for a long period before they are discovered.
“We are finding methods of stopping and recovering such funds paid in error to dead pensioners and that is why we are seeking your collaboration on how you tackle this issue. The pension strength is going down and it is important we block all the leakages to enable better service of pensioners,” he added.
Responding, Executive Secretary of the Directorate, Barr Sharon Ikeazor, said the success it recorded so far was because the directorate made the request of Bank Verification Numbers (BVN) a priority.
“We discovered that about 15,600 pensioners had been paid without BVN so we took them off the payroll and surprisingly, only a few of them came back to complain and we put them back on the payroll. That is how we were able to retrieve the funds paid in error,” she said.

 

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