PTAD to begin North East pensioners’ verification
NAN-HE-22
PTAD
Abuja, Nov.23, 2016(NAN) The Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) says it will begin its verification of pensioners in the north east from Nov. 28.
This was disclosed by its Executive Secretary, Mrs Sharon Ikeazor, during a courtesy visit to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Wednesday in Abuja.
She said PTAD came to NAN because she believed in collaboration of sister government agencies, to help government on its development programmes.
Ikeazor said the first phase of the civil service pensioners’ verification would start from the north east region comprising Adamawa, Bauchi, Taraba and Gombe states
“The first place to start the verification must be the north east so that we can key into the Federal Government’s efforts at rebuilding the northeast.
“We can’t forget the north, insurgency or no insurgency; we are going in there to verify the pensioners so that we can put them on the pay roll,’’ she said.
Ikeazor also said there were four of such pension departments to be involved namely the Police Pension, the Civil Service, Custom and Immigration as well as the parastatals.
She said while PTAD would start with the civil service, the other departments would foll soon.
The PTAD executive secretary said efforts would be made to determine the state with the highest number of pensioners through the nominal roll.
She said Adamawa, with a little over 2,000 pensioners, “will take like a week to verify”.
According to her, “each of the pensioners has to come with the employment record, we need to know their length of service, their grade level before retirement and their pension entitlements’’.
“So we expect them to come with their essential employment records to compute their pension and capture their bio-metrics,’’ she said.
Ikeazor, who visited NAN with the Project Coordinator for the north east, Nneka Obiamalu, explained that the essence of the details of employment records was to retain them in the data base.
“This is so in order for them not to go through this repeatedly, which is the essence of the entire exercise.
“We hope to come away with a little over 6,000 pensioners in our data base so that we can solve their problems,’’ Obiamalu said.
Responding to question from the Managing Director of the News Agency of Nigeria, Mr Bayo Onannuga, on the cut-off year for federal civil servants, Obiamalu said: “For the federal civil service, the cut-off year is the last day of June, 2007.
“For the state pensioners, it is March 31, 2011.’’
“In future, we intend to have offices in the 36 states of the federation.’’
She said besides verification, PTAD also carried out“mobile verification” for pensioners who were ill or too old to move.
“We visit them with our computers to do their biometrics for them in their homes or hospitals. So the era of pensioners suffering is over; we treat them with empathy,’’ Ikeazor said.
The team also said that PTAD had a Call Centre linked to the Office of the Head of Service of the Federation to address complaints.
Onanuga thanked the team for the visit, pledging the agency’s support the directorate.
Onanuga spoke of the agency’s magazine whose maiden edition was expected to be launched next week.
“We call it Nigeria. We have no other befitting name. We hope to project our government in a positive light because the story about our country is usually negative,’’ he said.
Onanuga also highlighted the agency’s multimedia service products including the NAN TV. (NAN)
SET/IA
Edited by Idris Abdulrahman