PenCom commences retirees’ online verification today

The National Pension Commission (PenCom) has revealed plans to commence a pilot scheme of its online pre-retirement verification and enrolment exercise for retirees in government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) in the country.

The commission, at a workshop titled ‘Positioning the Pension Industry in a Post-COVID Era’ held in Lagos, said the enrolment will take off between August 2nd to 20th 2021.

PenCom said it could register, verify and enroll prospective retirees of treasury-funded federal government MDAs to compute their accrued pension rights and budgetary allocations.

“As a prelude to the formal deployment of the online enrolment application, the commission would commence the exercise with selected MDAs in the six geo-political zones and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to test-run the application with real-time data,” it said.

“Accordingly, the online enrolment application would be hosted on PenCom website: https://www.pension.gov.ng The commission called on prospective retirees to undergo data recapturing exercise with their respective pension fund administrators (PFAs) as it is a prerequisite for online enrolment.

The Assistant General Manager, National Databank Management Department, PenCom, Maryam Bello, said since the commencement of the retirement savings account (RSA) transfer system, 25,645 workers have transferred a total value of N102.59 billion to other PFAs.

Bello, stressed that 2,799, 12,681 and 10,165 workers transferred N18.90 billion, N47.78 billion and N35.91 billion in the fourth quarter (Q4) of 2020, Q1 2021 and Q2 2021 respectively.

Meanwhile, the commission said pension fund assets surged to N12.66 trillion as of June 30, 2021, with 9.38 million registered RSAs . Director-General, PenCom, Aisha Dahir-Umar, earlier in her welcome remarks, said that the number of registered contributors under the CPS has grown to 9.38 million during the period.

The DG , who was represented by the Head, Corporate Communications in the commission, Peter Aghahowa, equally hinted that President Muhammadu Buhari has approved the payment of a 2.5 per cent differential in the rate of employer pension contribution for FGN retirees and employees.

This, according to her, resulted from the increase in the minimum pension contribution for employers from 7.5 percent to 10 percent, in line with Section 4 (1) of the Pension Reform Act (PRA) 2014.

She added that those payments would boost the RSA balances of the beneficiaries towards better retirement benefits. The settlement of these outstanding accrued pension rights of verified and enrolled FGN retirees, she said, would result in reversing a major challenge that has lingered since 2014.

Dahir-Umar noted that the commencement of payment of the reviewed monthly pension contribution rate by the Federal Government was another significant step in ensuring compliance with the PRA 2014.