THE Accountant General’s Department (AcGD) is struggling to ascertain if some of its high-risk pensioners — aged 90 and over — are actually alive as it continues to make monthly payments to them.

Accountant General Anya Jones says efforts to verify whether these pensioners are alive have been hampered by the novel coronavirus pandemic as officers of the department are sometimes barred from entering the homes of these individuals.The department has been paying out millions to pensioners, either without verification, or despite acknowledgement of their deaths.

There are just over 1,200 active pensioners aged 90 and older on the payroll of the AcGD.

“Team members have attempted visitation and they were not allowed into the household of some of these pensioners,” Jones told the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) yesterday.

The accountant general was answering questions about the department’s failure to safeguard the integrity of pension payments and ensure that funds are not being paid out to illegitimate individuals.

Auditor General Pamela Monroe Ellis, in her annual report for 2019/20, which went to Parliament in January, drew attention to stark deficiencies in the department’s process of checking to ensure that pensioners are alive before continuing to disburse payments, and removing deceased pensioners from the payroll.Also, the AcGD has not prioritised monitoring pensioners who are over 90 years old due to prolonged delays in visiting these pensioners, to verify that they are alive.Monroe Ellis pointed to one example in which in February 2017 the AcGD’s payroll database showed that there were 434 pensioners over the age of 90 of which only 149 were listed as active. The AcGD reported it had visited only four of these pensioners between April 2016 and March 2017. However, evidence of verification was provided for only two of the pensioners at the time of the audit.

She also noted instances in which the department paid out $1.8 million to 25 pensioners, for periods of up to seven months, after the expiration of their life certificates and acknowledgement of their deaths.

AcGD’s policy requires submission of life certificates on a quarterly basis to verify that pensioners are alive.Still, in some instances, it took up to 33 months to remove pensioners from the payroll. “The failure to update the files and payroll system may result in irregularities and loss of public funds. This risk manifested when AcGD overpaid 23 dependents a total of $4.1 million because it failed to identify dependents over 18 years, or where extensions granted by the MOFPS [Ministry of Finance and the Public Service] had expired for those in school. To date, the overpaid amounts have not been recovered,” Monroe Ellis reported.

The AcGD has 33,000 pensioners in its database, 1,000 of whom are overseas.It made pension payments of more than $609 million to pensioners living overseas between 2012 and 2018, without verifying that the pensioners were alive.

Jones acknowledged the risks, stressing that many of the issues identified by the auditor general had to do with the high level of manual processing now being used, but that efforts were being made to procure a new pension payment system.