A Director at the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD), Yusuf Umar has disclosed yesterday in Abuja during a training for pension reporters that in spite of recent effort to cut the lump sum of inherited liabilities under the Defined Benefits Scheme, the federal government of Nigeria still owes an accrued pension arrears of N90.1 billion unfunded liabilities to pensioners of some agencies of the government.
The agencies affected are: Assurance Bank, Nigeria Re-Insurance Corporation,New Nigeria Newspapers (NNN), Nigeria Aviation Handling Company (NAHCO), Federal Housing Authority (FHA), Nigeria National Shipping Line (NNSL) Delta Steel Company (DSC), NICON Insurance, NITEL/MTEL, and Aluminium Smelting Company of Nigeria (ALSCON).
Also, PTAD’s director, civil service department Suleiman Shelle who was represented by Ini Nathan disclosed that there is currently a total of 107,000 pensioners covered in the payroll of PTAD after removing 20,000 pensioners with irregularities.
PTAD said its recently launched web-based verification platform for retirees under the Defined Benefit Scheme codenamed ‘I Am Alive’ and received over 7000 hit attempts for verification, with 5010 successful ones.
The directorate said 55 per cent of those who were successful did so through facial recognition, while 45 per cent did via fingerprint. The use of the digital verification exercise was launched last month to ease the process of future validation of pensioners on our payroll and is still at the testing phase.
Umar said the issue of unpaid pension liabilities has continued to be a major concern for the directorate. He however said discussions on speedy settlement of the outstanding pensions between PTAD management and the federal government were at advanced stage.
He further explained that the outstanding is being paid with allocation from the national budget, indicating that payment of the N90.1 billion pension liabilities would still take some years. “It is not a one-off thing, but we are seriously working to see that the backlog is cleared soon,” he stated.
So far, a total of 936 ex-workers were paid a total of N1,132,807,425 as severance package in 2007. PTAD has paid a total of 620 beneficiaries the outstanding one-off final severance benefit due to the ex-workers after netting off the previous payment.