PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa finance department believes an initiative to reform the pension system of the province is likely to reduce the number of pensioners by around 30,000 and save the exchequer over Rs8 billion annually.

The relevant officials told Dawn that the finance department was alarmed at the increase in the province’s pension bill that amounted to Rs53 billion in the current year and therefore, it had begun the system’s structural reforms, which included digitisation of the pensioners’ records, replacement of one bank based payments with individual accounts, proposed amendments to the pension rules and biometric verification among others.

Provincial finance secretary Shakeel Qadir Khan told Dawn that the department was set to complete the digitisation of the pensioner records and that it had so far digitised the documents of 127,000 people.

He said the digitisation was likely to bring down the pensioners’ number from the current 170,000 to 135,000 by eliminating ghost pensioners, replications and suspicious cases.

Number of pensioners likely to go down by around 30,000

The secretary said after the automation of the pension system, the department would be able to project the pension growth and know about all beneficiaries.

He added that the department was working out a bank account-based disbursement to the pensioners to eliminate ghost pensioners.

Mr Shakeel said the department had proposed amendments to the pension rules to the federal government to end a very liberal pension regime.

“The existing pension system is very anomalous,” he said.

The secretary said the department was also working on reconciliation with the federal government suspecting that in several cases, it was paying pension to federal government employees.

He admitted that the growth of the KP pension fund, which currently totaled Rs40 billion, was slow.

“The pension fund of Rs700 billion will be self-sustainable without cash injection by the government,” he said.

Project manager of the Automation of Pension Payment System Naveed Alam told Dawn that the pension budget was estimated by the district account officers (DAOs) and disbursed through designated banks.

He said the DAOs were to carry out the post-payment audit of vouchers provided by the bank but that was not taking place due to a lack of capacity.

Mr Naveed said the pensioners could so far only receive their money from the National Bank of Pakistan but they had held meetings with other banks, which had agreed to provide ATMs with simplified activation procedures.

“We are also starting a pilot project to collect biometric verification of all pensioners from districts of Peshawar, Charsadda and Mardan from Jan 2018, which will be extended to other districts a month later,” he said.

The project manager said the National Database and Registration Authority had agreed to verify the details for the provincial government and help zero in on whether the pensioners was real person.

He said the department would also replace the manual life certificates with multi-layered digital certificates using Nadra services.

Mr Naveed said the analysis of digitised data had offered newer insights into the pension system.

He said of the 127,000 pensioners, 85,103 were alive, while around 42,000 cases families received the sums.

“We have a case where a person with a date of birth in 1932 retired in 1988 and died in 2003,” he said, adding that his spouse continued to collect the pension until 2014 and later, a 52-year-old widow daughter received it.

He said that woman had shared a family tree of five sisters and six brothers with the department hinting at there was no immediate end of payment to this family in sight.

The official said the department had also come across the case of a BPS-18 female government officer, who was drawing Rs120,000 as her salary and Rs60,000 as father’s pension being his dependent at the same time.

In a bid to overcome such cases, the finance department is mulling proposals including not allowing pensions to unmarried daughter after 35 years, widow daughter having a son over 21 years of age and exclude brother, sister, father, grandson, mother, daughter-in-law and granddaughter besides changing definition of the dependent.

Published in Dawn, December 22nd, 2017