ISLAMABAD (Kashmi English): The government has made a significant change in the pension payment process by taking responsibility for biometric verification and verification of proof-of-life certificates of more than 300,000 civil and military pensioners from commercial banks and entrusting it to NADRA.
According to the Ministry of Finance, in light of the Prime Minister’s instructions, new SOPs related to pension payment have been issued, under which commercial banks will no longer play any administrative or legal role in biometric verification of pensioners or verification of proof of life certificates.
Under the new system, NADRA has been appointed as the responsible authority for biometric verification of pensioners.
NADRA has been linked to the Controller General of Accounts (CGA) and Military Accountant General (MAG) systems through a secure API, as a result of which the digital life signal will be transferred directly from NADRA to CGA or MAG and the channel of commercial banks will be eliminated.
According to the government, banks will now act only as pension disbursing agencies. Under normal circumstances, they will not have any role in verifying, receiving, preserving, or validating the Proof of Life Certificate or biometric data of pensioners.
However, they can be used as an authorized operational source for issuing Proof of Life Certificates through NADRA’s designated system.
NADRA will now directly deliver Proof of Life verification of federal pensioners to the concerned accounts offices. Verification will be required every 180 days, while verification will be possible through various facilities including Pak-ID.
Account Suspense Status if Life Signal is not received. The new SOPs also clarify that the pension disbursing account of any pensioner will not be dormant by the bank for payment or processing of pension. The general dormancy rules of the bank will not apply to such accounts.
According to official statistics, there are 1848,151 civil pensioners in the country, including 399,058 from the federal government, 225,112 from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 320,754 from Sindh, 1528 from Balochistan, 51,641 from Azad Kashmir, 16,05 from Gilgit-Baltistan, 610,823 from Punjab and 124,230 from Pakistan Railways.
The number of military pensioners in the country is 1326,500, taking the total number of civil and military pensioners to over 3 million.
Under the new SOPs, all previous procedures related to the payment of pensions have been canceled, while the previously prevalent physical ‘disburser’s half’ method for federal pensions has also been abolished. Federal pensions will now be paid exclusively through the Direct Credit system.
