GIFMIS: Pensioners War Over Delayed Payment, As Govt Blames Technology

As retirees under the Federal Civil Service Pensions, protest non-payment of their pension benefits, it appears there is a glitch within the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) causing that.

This was gleaned during a discussion by experts managing pension payments who appeared on Channels Television Sunrise Daily on Thursday morning, monitored by Prime Business Africa.

Last week Monday, 13 June, some federal civil service retirees at, Lagos State branch staged a protest at the Lagos office of the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) and complained about non-payment of pensions among other challenges encountered by federal retirees in the country.  They called on the government to promptly respond to the plight of the pensioners.

In response to that, the Executive Secretary PTAD, Chioma Ejikeme had said they take the complaints of pensioners serious but the challenge is that after processing payments it fails on the GIFMIS platform, and the directorate don’t get to know until pensioners complain.

The GIFMIS platform is domiciled within the office of the Accountant General of the Federation. It is an Information Technology based system for budgeting, accounting and general management of government finances.

Commenting on what led to the pensioners’ protest, Comrade Abiodun Michael, Secretary, Federal Civil Service Pensioners, Lagos chapter, said there were a lot of complaints from pensioners overtime which were related to the national authority to address but nothing was practically done to resolve the challenge, forcing the pensioners to take to the streets and register their displeasure with the payment system.

Comrade Abiodun said his members affected by the non-payment were still yet to be paid as at the time of appearing on the programme. He wondered why a glitch could suspend a retiree’s legitimate entitlement for more than three years and still running.

Talking about poor response, he said, “there are series of letters personally written to PTAD, and nothing positive came out it.” He said several pensioners have not been paid even when PTAD continues to claim the payments have been made from its end.

National secretary, Civil Service Pensioners, Comrade Christian Azunna also confirmed that there series of cases of non-payment of the federal retirees they received from across states and passed to PTAD. Some he said were addressed while many were yet to be responded to.

Responding, Jeremiah Asanato, deputy programme manager, system support and sustainability, GIFMIS, office of the AGF, said GIFMIS is not squarely responsible for failed processing of pensioners’ payment. He said when a payment is finalized in GIFMIS, it goes through a gateway to the CBN where the Treasury Single Account (TSA) is debited and the beneficiary bank is credited who now credits the end beneficiary, but sometimes challenges of network and invalid account details disrupt the process leading to payment failure.

Asanato explained that when they receive service request from PTAD, they investigate to know what happened, and if it is a case of failed payment, they notify PTAD to reprocess it so that the affected pensioners can get their money. He stated that their system takes about 24 hours to investigate failed payments and give feedback to PTAD.

On his part, Ini Nathan, deputy director (accounts) civil service dept of PTAD, said the issue of non-payment of pensioners’ benefits is not only peculiar to system glitch but there are instances of observed inconsistencies in the record of pensioners, and also the provision of wrong data in which case, their payments were suspended or failed to through. Speaking on the issue one John Ofili who was being owed over three years arrears and being traumatized and hospitalized, he said the payment was made, but comrade Abiodun said the man has not received it. Nathan displayed a printed document from GIFMIS platform showing it was processed from the end of PTAD but still pending.

Countering the issue of wrong information supplied by pensioners as being responsible for non-payment, Abiodun said if that was the case, they wouldn’t have received payment in the first place, but what happened was that some retirees after receiving for some time are left unpaid running into as much as nine months and more.