FIJ
The meeting was slated for one of the conference rooms in the office of the Account-General of the Federation (OAGF) in Garki, Abuja.
Friends, mostly officials representing Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs) and Pension Fund Custodians (PFC), met and shook hands.
Foes, who belonged to the same industry, also exchanged pleasantries, pretending to be happy at the sight of one another.
The many challenges being experienced in the Pension Fund industry were discussed in small circles, amid banters and jokes, with contemporaries trying to make one another see why their respective organisations have the best welfare packages and services for contributors in the country.
The meeting was originally scheduled to start at 11.am. But 20 minutes after, no one present could exactly tell when it would commence any longer.
The reason was that the officials of the Integrated Payroll and Personal Information System (IPPIS) Department, the meeting hosts, were still nowhere to be found.
When they eventually arrived at 11.35am, the PFA and PFC representatives hurriedly took their seats. Their once friendly mien had automatically changed into hostile expressions.
Men were no longer smiling.
At this point, a two-man contingent of E-Tranzact, a third party Payments Solutions Provider, had also arrived.
Even the deaf could tell a war was about to ensue.
It was a war involving IPPIS and E-Tranzact on one team, and Pension Fund Operators (PENOP), comprising of PFAs and PFCs, on another team.
The meeting was about how E-Tranzact, with IPPIS’s blessings, had been indiscriminately deducting N30 service charge from the monthly pension contributions of over 1,500,000 federal government employees, across 711 Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), since February 2021.
GUNS BLAZING RIGHT FROM THE START
In his opening address, Nsikak Ben, the Acting Director, IPPIS, expressed happiness that all relevant stakeholders were present at the meeting, going ahead to talk about the purpose for which the meeting was called.
“The purpose of the meeting is in compliance with the joint directives from the Head of Service of the Federation and the Honourable Minister of Finance that E-Tranzact, through IPPIS, should discontinue the N30 deduction from the source, and that stakeholders should meet and fashion out the means of sustaining services,” he said.
He also added that his office had written a letter to E-Tranzact, instructing them to discontinue the deduction, and to also find a way of refunding all the money that has been deducted from February 2021 till date.
This latest statement was met with several nods of approval from the PFA and PFC representatives present in the room.
“More importantly, we are here to put our heads together on the way forward. The Pension Commission (Pencom) has also made it clear that they would, upon review, embrace whatever resolution we arrive at,” Ben added.
In suggesting a sustainable way forward, we should all see this as a call to national service. We should be able to shift positions, we should be flexible, because anything that has to do with pension contribution has to do with the whole country.”
Sensing where the conversation was headed, the PFA and PFC representatives shook their heads vehemently at the latest utterance by the acting director.
It was clear IPPIS wanted them to be responsible for a percentage of the charges going forward.
The representatives’ body language told anyone that cared to decipher that there would be no shifting of ground.
‘WE DO NOT KNOW E-TRANZACT! WE HAVE NO AGREEMENT WITH THEM!’
When it was his turn to speak, Oguche Agudah, the Chief Executive Officer of Pension Fund Operators Association of Nigeria (PENOP), the umbrella body for PFAs and PFCs, thanked the hosts for orgainising the meeting.
What then followed were statements reflecting the position of the body he represents.
“I have had extensive engagements with the managements of the 22 PFAs and 4 PFCs under our body, and the first thing I would like to make clear is that they feel slighted that they were not consulted before the decision to deduct the charges was reached,” Agudah said.
“In terms of moving forward, one of the key feedback I got from them is that E-Tranzact is not known to us, we do not have any agreement with them, we do not have any arrangement with them, we do not have any contract with them and we do not see a reason for paying for a service that is not privy to us. We also believe that if a principal has hired an agent for a special service, the principal should be the one to pay the agent, not any other way.”
The PENOP executive also used an illustration to further buttress his position.
“If I take a schedule containing the pension payments of my employees to the bank for processing, I won’t say the service charges should be taken from the payments that are meant for them, I would have to be the one to bear the charges. In this case, IPPIS would have to be the ones to bear the charges, not innocent pension contributors,” he said.
Agudah closed by restating that his body was not open to paying the fees and that PENOP is not also open to engaging with a third party that is alien to it.
This story first appeared in FIJ
