24th July, 2015
The Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) has discovered 3,000 ghost pensioners in the police pension scheme, the Director-General, Nellie Mayshak, has said.
Mayshak made the disclosure at a two-day sensitisation workshop in Abuja on Thursday, saying, “when PTAD was first given the police pensions payroll, it contained 18,000 pensioners which we thought were all genuine.
“But when we went around the states to verify, we discovered that there were 15,000 pensioners in the police.
“If we had not made this discovery, we would have been paying pension to these non-existing 3,000 pensioners.”
Mayshak said that the directorate saved the Federal Government more than N100 million monthly which would have been paid to the ghost pensioners.
She said PTAD was partnering Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) to ensure that pension fraudsters were eliminated in the system.
Mayshak advised pensioners to submit their pension records to PTAD so that it could access their liabilities and advise them appropriately.
She said the workshop was to sensitise stakeholders, particularly the pensioners, to what they were expected to do to access their entitlements seamlessly.
Mayshak said that PTAD was handling the payrolls of 132,000 pensioners from the civil service, parastatal agencies and the police.
According to her, there are 104,000 pensioners in the civil service, 13,000 in parastatal agencies and 15,000 in the police.
She said that PTAD had sensitised pensioners through their unions, radio commercials, newspaper advertisements and SMS not to pay money to any person before their files could be processed.