The House of Representatives Committee on Finance has queried the Pension Transitional.Arrangement Directorate PTAD on the use of agents to recover about £25 million in invested funds by the agency in the United Kingdom and mandated the agency to provide the committee with details of the recovered funds and bank details of its lodgement.
Chairman of the House Committee Hon James Faleke issued the queries during the Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper MTEF/FSP interactive session with. Ministries Departments and Agencies on Thursday at the National Assembly.
The lawmaker had asked why the agency would engage the services agents to repatriate the funds invested with Crown Agents of the United Kingdom with N437 million against the international best practices on funds recovery
He asked the agency officials if it was right to waste pensioners and tax payers money on such recovery on agents whereas the global practice is to use the staff of the legal department of the agency for such recoveries.
The All Progressives Congress APC lawmaker said that the House Committee is concerned about the plight of pensioners in Nigeria who are supposed to be benefitiaries of such invested funds but are being owed many months of arrears of salaries and even allowances by the agency.
He said:” the PTAD is not a revenue generating agency but there is this fund that is meant for pensioners that we are concerned about.
“How do you use recovery agent to recover such funds. It was alleged that retirees are being owed about N30 million in pension arrears?”.
But the Executive Secretary of the PTAD Dr Chioma Ejikeme said that the funds in question was meant to be transferred to the Cocoa Research Institute of Nigeria and the Federal Civil Service Commission.
She further told the House Committee that the agency in 2018 got a presidential approval to transfer the funds from the Crown Agents to the agency.
She added that they used the £1 Million pounds out of the recovered funds to offset the liabilities of some privatized government agencies.
The House Committee also grilled the Executive Secretary of the National Board for Technical Education NBTE and asked the agency to increase its internally generated revenue paid into the consolidated revenue fund of the federation.
