AT present, all former employees of the Punjab government are undergoing a serious hassle as they have been asked to update their pension accounts by imme-diately replacing the conventional bank account details with those based on the International Bank Account Number (IBAN) specifications.

By doing so, the government wants this to be able to transfer the pension amount directly into the bank accounts. Those who fail to update the data in time will face obstacles in receiving their pension on time.

My sister, who is the widow of a Punjab government pensioner, is also required to do so. However, when my nephew went to the district accounts office (DAO) in Rawalpindi to submit the application, he was told that the process could be carried out only at the office of the accountant-general, Punjab Revenues, in Lahore, as the DAO could only update the records of pensioners who are living in Rawalpindi district.

Apparently, the information made sense, but then my nephew was told that if he was willing to pay Rs5,000 as ‘travel fare’, the needful could be done from the DAO office as well.

It was a clear indication that the record could be updated from DAO Rawalpindi, but only after the relevant palms were properly greased.

Obviously, travelling to Lahore would have entailed spending much more money than the gratification that was being demanded by the DAO staff.

However, this simple exercise which required the addition of an eight-digit prefix to the account number to convert it into IBAN, could easily have been done by the government itself through collecting the required information from the relevant banks.

Moreover, this would have facilitated the process and spared the pensioners the inconvenience they have been made to suffer.

Eventually, this simple step would have also ‘deprived’ the staff of a perfect oppor-tunity to have their palms greased by thousands of pensioners, and, in turn, ens-ured a transparent and hassle-free service.

Dr Tariq-Ur-Rahman
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, November 5th, 2024