The Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) has revealed that its recent verification exercise for retired police pensioners led to the elimination of 3,000 ghost pensioners from its system. This, it revealed, led to a drastic reduction in its payroll by N100 million monthly.

The Director General, PTAD, Nellie Mayshak, disclosed this during an interview with journalists, on the sidelines of the verification exercise for Customs, Immigration and Prison pensioners in Lagos at the weekend.

"For the Police verification which we concluded recently, we went to the field with 18,000 pensioners on our payroll, and we came back with 15,000. So, automatically, 3,000 of it was bogus and so our payroll has come down by N100 million every month.

"On the good side, there were 600 pensioners that had never received any payment since they retired, which is unjust, so we are quickly going to pay those people. Through the process, we have seen that some people are underpaid while some are overpaid and so we are adjusting all that," Mayshak stated.

According to her, the main objective of PTAD was to make things better for pensioners. The pensioners are those that did not join the new contributory pension scheme, which is the old pensioners.

They include the civil service pensioners, police, customs, immigration, prison and government-funded parastatals that are being paid by the government on a monthly basis.

"Many of them have suffered. A lot of them are owed arears and on many instances, government's reforms have not addressed their concerns. This verification is to correct the data of the pensioners. The database of the payroll that we inherited was not worth its salt at all. We are paying with a payroll that does not contain the proper information and we needed to correct that. There are ghost pensioners, some were being underpaid and some were being overpaid.

"We are using technology to make sure there is no forgery in the system. We have promised pensioners that this will be last verification of its kind and we don't need to go back to them for another verification," she stressed.

The verification exercise for Customs, Immigration and Prison pensioners commenced on July 27 2015. The exercise was scheduled to take place in 13 centers across the country namely: Rivers, Edo, Cross River, Enugu, Imo, Lagos, Oyo, Kano, Sokoto, Bauchi, FCT, Kwara and Benue.

PTAD was established in August 2013 in compliance with the provision of section 30(2) (a) of the Pension Reform Act (PRA) 2004 as amended in 2014. PTAD is charged with the responsibility of pension management under the Defined Benefit Scheme, (DBS) for pensioners who did not transit to the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS).