House of Representatives Committee on Public Accounts Committee has instituted a technical ad-hoc committee to audit the various sums appropriated annually to PTAD.
This follows the multiple queries raised by the office of the Auditor General of the Federation against the Pension Transitional Arrangement Director since its inception in 2013.
The Chairman of the Committee, Mr Oluwole Oke, announced this during a hearing on the queries with the management team of the agency.
Mr Oke said that despite trillions of Naira released to the agency as yearly appropriation, pensioners were still crying about the non-payment of their entitlements across the states and the FCT, Abuja.
According to him, ad-hoc committee will have to look into the activities of the agency and come up with something that will guide the committee to carry out its assignment.
The committee chairman, demanded a comprehensive list of beneficiaries under the agency’s pension scheme as well as evidence of direct remittance to them on a monthly basis to enable it to verify the complaints of non-payments of the pension.
The PAC chairman also instructed the committee clerk to write the CBN governor requesting PTAD’s bank statements over the years and a similar one to the Accountant General of the Federation (AGF) for copies of letters of release for pension payment on a monthly basis.
The Director of Civil Service Pension in PTAD, Mr Sulayman Shellong, admitted that for the financial year ending December 2020, the agency got a budgetary allocation of N124 billion out of which N119.2 billion was released and N127.9 billion was expended on pension payment and arrears to beneficiaries.
He said the balance was mopped up and paid into the consolidated revenue account at the end of the financial year and denied any infraction on the part of the agency in the area of pension to beneficiaries under its scheme.
RN