Endless pension fraud

[Mirror]

The recent alarm raised by the authorities of the National Pension Commission— PenCom—regarding deducted but unremitted pension funds makes me happy and sad in one breadth. Happy because I was the first to express serious concern about the poor remittance practice and dangerous operations of the new pension scheme inaugurated in 2004 ostensibly to remedy the pitfalls of the old pension scheme under the Office of the Head of Service of the federation in a two serial article on this page entitled, "Between PenCom and Pension Managers." Sad because after that alarm and the furore it generated coupled with the catalogue of stories of fraud and corruption in the old pension scheme as well as the re-assuring response of PenCom to public criticisms and outcry against its poor remittance culture, it came as a shock and agonizing surprise that PenCom should still be complaining of unremitted accrued pension contributions of workers and their employers to their Retirement Savings Accounts–RSAs.

More confounding still is the revelation from PenCom that there are about 146 cases of unpaid benefits earlier approved by the Commission and fraudulent debit of N39 million on some RSAs by a Pension Fund Custodian. Worse still, there are confirmable allegations of phony RSAs with regular remittances to people that are not employees of any organization. Surely, these sort of distressing revelations and disclosures have given a lie to the original intention and claim by the new pension commission that it is impervious to fraud. Now, how would Chinelo Amazu, the new Acting Director-General of PenCom, react to this embarrassing disclosures and revelations, when she had warned, on assumption of office, that nobody should associate her commission with stories of fraud; insinuating that journalists who associate PenCom with fraud may be apprehended and arraigned for libel?

It is either that the PenCom is grandstanding or that it is unwittingly hosting a bunch of fraudulent pension fund administrators in its ranks or that the regulators of the pension funds are downright complicit, corrupt and incompetent. Sometime ago in 2010 or thereabout, the Military pulled out of the contributory pension scheme after allegations of pension irregularities. Retirees still shuttle between their villages in the different and remote parts of the country and Abuja to process their retirement benefits, under the new contributory pension scheme, wasting resources and time, and sometimes even dying in road accidents in a bid to collect their entitlements. Evidently, this is not the stress-free and fraud-proof contributory pension scheme that the PenCom was established and charged to superintend for the convenience and happiness of retirees and their beneficiaries.

It should be recalled that one of the stated objectives of the new contributory pension scheme, sold to the pensionable public at inception, was to expunge all possibilities and perceptions of fraud from pension fund administration in the country; and make access to the fund by beneficiaries at retirement easy and stress-free. The old pension scheme was operated in a way that gave the muddleheaded impression that the fund was deliberately created by government as a pool of cash resource essentially for patronage to its protégés; how-be-it, calculated to delude and lure the alleged beneficiaries to early and instant death, after retirement, as pension was never intended to be paid to deserving retirees. If this impression was never contemplated by pension fund administrators and government, the harrowing experiences of pensioners more than confirm it. Almost every Nigerian family can tell tales of woes regarding pension irregularities and unpaid pension benefits that resulted in early deaths of their aged parents, nieces and uncles. Both government and the affected pensioners were scandalized, traumatized, and at their wits end.

It was to address this concern that the new contributory pension scheme, midwifed as a Daniel come to judgment, was conceived and set up to wipe out all the travails of retirees and make pension fund accessible to beneficiaries without obstacles and complications. Unfortunately, the operation of the scheme, like the one before it, is gravitating to the contrary; thus making the experience of a pensioner, a citizen's worst nightmare. On top of this, there is news that the PenCom is on forage, call it aggressive drive, for more contributors to the scheme to further swell the pool of funds available to government from the retirement savings of the nation's workers.

With conflicting and confusing signals such as these, it is suspect whether the operators of the scheme really have the welfare and happiness of the pension contributors in their equation. It seems more certain, by the day, that PenCom is more on a forage; call it aggressive revenue drive, to swell the pool of funds available to government, rather than any genuine concern about the safety of contributors' funds or the welfare, convenience and happiness of retirees.

People who have worked and served the country all their lives should have unfettered access to their pension contributions with the same speed that shareholders get their cheques from the Stock Exchange and the Central Security Checking System—CSCS, within three days of instruction to their stock brokers. All the bottlenecks that make pensioners to travel to Abuja several times in pursuit of their entitlements are deliberate administrative designs to prevent retirees from accessing their benefits and thus accelerating early death for pensioners. People are too weak at retirement to fight government and its obstructive bureaucracies; and this is what has given impetus to pension fund administrators and their regulators to exhibit more interest in generating revenue from pension contributions, rather than a willingness to allow contributors to enjoy the fruit of their labor

A society that wishes to re-assure its youth and avert anarchy should desist from treating its aged citizens as trash. Pensioners are treated by government and pension fund operators as trash. It is a national embarrassment and disgrace for a country's senior citizens to be so treated. The time to put an end to this national embarrassment and disgrace is now.

 

National Mirror

[Folami David]

We just hope the whole rubbish will stop someday cos it's really not funny anymore. People lose their life bcos of this!