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‘Insufficient fund in retirement bond account causes pension delay’

The Director, Centre for Pension Right Advocacy (CPRA), Barr Ivor Takor, said lack of sufficient money in the Retirement Benefits Bond Redemption Fund Account (RBBRFA) in the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) was the current cause for the delays in paying the pension of retired federal public servants.

This, he said, was because the Federal Government’s remittance of deductions from employees’ salaries and its own contributions as an employer is also not adequately funding the RBBRFA in the CBN.

Takor, who stated this in a statement made available to Business247 News Online, noted that if the account is not being adequately funded, there will not be money to pay the accrued pension rights of employees who were in the federal civil service before the commencement of the Contributory Pension Scheme (CPS). The bulk of pension money for those who have put in over twenty years of service is in the accrued pension rights, he stressed.

With this development, he said: “We are gradually returning to the pre-pension reform era, where under the Defined Benefit Scheme, retired public servants and pensioners were not sure when their retirement benefits and pensions will be paid. The question therefore is what can be done to avoid the drift to the inglorious past, in the face of current economic challenges facing the nation.”

A failure to remit the areas contributions, he said, amounts to non-compliance with the provisions of the Pension Reform Act 2014 by the Federal Government. It also amount to rubbing federal government workers by their own employer, he noted.

He urged FG to make sufficient payment into the RBBRF account in the CBN to ensure that retiring federal civil servants are paid their retirement benefits as at when due in line with the objectives of the CPS.

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