The Jamaica Gleaner has reported that the island’s Accountant General’s Department has been placed under the microscope following revelations that dead persons have been ‘drawing down’ millions of dollars in pensions up to seven months after they have died.
The disclosure came on the back of last Tuesday’s tabling in the National Assembly of the Report of the country’s Auditor General which made specific reference to the payment of J$1.8 million to twenty-five pensioners seven months after the expiration of their life certificates and acknowledgement of their deaths.
The authorities have stated that having regard to the fact that this specific disclosure arose out of an assessment done on a sample basis, the loss exposure could be more.
While the policy of the island’s Accountant General’s Department stipulates that pensioners should submit life certificates on a quarterly basis to verify that they are alive before the disbursement of payments, “the untimely verification of pensioners appears to be a recurring decimal” based on previous audits. The Accountant General’s Department has been cited for failing “to reduce its risk exposure to the acceptable level of making payments to deceased pensioners for no more than three months, considering that life certificates are valid for three months,” the Gleaner story says.
In another revelation, the Report of the Auditor General revealed that the Accountant General’s Department in Kingston had made pension payments of more than $609 million to pensioners living overseas between 2012 and 2018, without verifying that the pensioners were still alive. “We found seven instances in which pensioners did not submit any life certificate for periods up to 17 years,” the Auditor General was quoted as saying.
There have been reported instances of similar types of pension fraud in Guyana.