PenCom To Begin Online Pre-Verification Of Retirees In August
Victoria Ogunrinde
The National Pension Commission has said it will commence online pre-retirement verification and enrolment exercise in August, a move aimed at eliminating the bottleneck in the manual exercise.
PenCom revealed that the exercise would be hosted on its platform after which it would be fully deployed.
This was announced during a conference organised by the commission in Lagos.
The commission disclosed that the persons that would be covered under the automation exercise are retirees and prospective retirees of treasury funded Ministries, Departments and Agencies.
PemCom said, “The application has the capabilities to register, verify and enrol prospective retirees of Treasury-funded Federal Government MDAs. Accordingly, the online enrolment application would be hosted on the PenCom website www.pencom.gov.ng
“PenCom would commence a Pilot Run of the exercise from 2nd to 20th August 2021 with selected MDAs in the six Geo-Political Zones and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) to test-run the application with real-time data.
“The application would Go-Live after the conclusion of the pilot run on a date to be announced by PenCom in due course.”
According to the commission, retirees/prospective retirees have to undergo the data recapturing exercise with their respective Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs) before they can qualify for the online enrolment.
“This entails updating their personal details and providing their National Identification Number (NIN). However, retirees/prospective retirees who have already undergone the data recapture exercise with their PFAs are not required to repeat the exercise,” PemCom added.
Abdulrahman Saleem, PenCom’s Head Contributory and Bond Redemption Department, explained that the exercise would help retirees and prospective retirees access their retirement benefits as at when due.
He said retirees are entitled to accrued pensions rights, contributions by both employees and employer as well as their return on investment.
Saleem said, ” Normally in the pilot run, there are issues because when you develop an application, you need to test it. We have done a test based on adaption internally, but now we want to use live data.”
He added that the automation will only go live after a successful pilot run.