Buhari to stop delayed payment of pensions

President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday said he would take measures to end the plight of retirees in the country.
Speaking at a meeting with the Director General of National Pension Commission, (PenCom), Dr. Chinelo Anohu-Amazu, at the State House, Abuja, President Buhari urged them to urgently look into the issues affecting retirees’ welfare with a view to addressing them.
In an interview with State House correspondents after the meeting with the President, the PenCom boss said: “The President has also directed for immediate resolution because you also have to be mindful of the situation we live in, most of them who are not able to access their benefits.
She said the issues had to do with accrued rights, those who were federal government workers and had moved to the contributory pensions systems midway into their career.
“So they have accrued right coming from their past service under the defined benefit under the federal government and what you have is because our budget is not as robust as we would wish, we have dwindling resources and every sector of the economy is affected.
“But the President has also directed that this matter be looked into and prioritized so that those who have retired receive their payment benefits as at when due.” She added
According to her, President Buhari also directed PenCom to work with the National Economic Council (NEC) to ensure that all the states are in full compliance of PenCom as soon as possible.
She continued : “The challenges are largely to deal with compliance, we need a lot more people on the scheme and he has directed that we work with the Vice President so that we can get the NEC to work with PENCom to ensure that all the states are in full compliance as soon as possible.
“The PenCom reforms has introduced the pension contributory scheme, the scorecard remains that we have 6.637million retirement savings account holders today and what that has done is show us the opportunity for more people to get in because that is only about 11% of the working population and the scheme has also given the Retirement Savings Account holder freedom to determine how his retirement benefit would be administered.” She said.
She said PenCom would work with the appropriate law enforcement agencies to check the incidences of employers who deduct from employees’ salaries without remitting it to the Retirement Savings Account.
PenCom, she said, also has a department devoted to enforcement and compliance.
“Right now even in PENCom we have a whole department devoted to enforcement and compliance, we have also engaged recovery agents because the compliance is on many level, some people have made deductions from their salaries and have not been remitted into their Retirement Savings Account (RSA).
“We are calling out to those people and we are going to work with the appropriate law enforcement agencies because it is a financial crime to take money out of an employees salary and do not then remit it to his Retirement Savings Account. It is something we take seriously.
“Then those who have not even complied at all, who have no RSA, who have no savings and part of what the commission is prioritizing this year is to ensure that very one, it doesn’t mean that you have to be in a formal employment, those in the informal sector will also be brought under the scheme because they are the ones that are most in need of a retirement saving plan.”
“First instance is that even before the PENCom licenses them they have engaged in extensive review, we have also made sure that the people who were licensed to manage this fund are those who have no known cases of mismanagement of funds anywhere and that is the first step.
“The second step is by regulations, we make sure we put robust regulations in place in order to checkmate any non-adherence to the issues we have at hand. Most importantly we use up to- date technology so that they have a daily reporting system to PenCom.
“We do not check them after the VAT, we check them on a daily basis and what we have is a robust system where the PFAs are those who are committed to administering the pension funds with the highest form of integrity and this is because as regulators we insist on it and so far from implementation till date we have not had any single case of mismanagement of the pensions fund,” she added.