FG Commence Mop-Up Biometric Verification of 21,000 Pensioners

FG Commence Mop-Up Biometric Verification of 21000 Pensioners

The Federal Government through the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) has kick-off another round of biometric verification exercises for 21,000 Federal Government pensioners who were not able to be verified during the exercise in the southwest region of the country in 2019 but were identified as bonafide pensioners.

Speaking to newsmen in Ibadan, the Executive Secretary of PTAD, Dr. Chioma Ejikeme, present at the biometric verification of pensioners who retired from the federal civil service, stated that the exercise was basically for Federal Government pensioners who were left out for one reason or the other in the 2019 exercise, held in the Southwest.

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According to Dr. Chioma Ejikeme:

“What we are actually doing now is a mop-up verification. It is not like the few verifications that we did in 2019 and after the review of verification of that of 2019, we have to validate that verification and in the process of validating that verification, we moved people who were on our payroll who are not yet verified.”

“So, a lot of them have been coming back and this was in October 2020. Then we moved about 21,000 pensioners who were not verified but were on the payroll. So they have been trickling back, saying they were bonafide pensioners; they were qualified and because of the numbers, we now decided to come back and do a mop-up verification.”

“So, this is for all those people who feel that they are unknown, that they are not captured, who knew that they are bonafide.

“We are asking all of them to avail themselves of this opportunity, to come and get verified because without that verification we won’t have a view on our database.”

She, however, said the agency has left no stone unturned to get rid of the activities which bedeviled the old pension regime.

“When PTAD was established, it inherited a myriad of problems that had bedeviled the old pension offices namely, the Police, the Civil Service, Customs, Immigration and Prisons (CIPPO), as well as the Boards of Trustees of Parastatals and Agencies, which were poorly managed and underfunded.”