THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Government pensioners who sneaked into social security pension scheme are set to lose the ill-gotten money. The finance department has asked treasuries department to deduct the defrauded money from their service pension benefits.As rule does not provide for deduction from service pension amount, including family pension, the deduction will be made from dearness allowance or pay revision arrears, according to an order issued by the finance department.
As a first step, local self-government secretaries will serve a notice on the illegal beneficiary to repay the amount within one month to avoid deduction from service or family pension benefit. Details of persons who do not respond to the notice will be handed to the treasury department for deductions.The finance minister’s office said the GO was part of an ongoing exercise to weed out ineligible beneficiaries from social security pension scheme. “The social security pension scheme has over 60 lakh subscribers. Weeding out ineligible beneficiaries is inevitable since the government wants to hike pension amount and also to cater to more eligible people,” said an officer.
He did not reveal the exact number of service pensioners who found a place in social security pension scheme. The government spends Rs 925 crore a month for social security pension scheme. About 15,000 service pensioners were excluded from the scheme during a previous exercise to weed out the ineligible. A big exercise to weed out the ineligible among social security pensioners and welfare fund board pensioners by way of an Aadhaar-aided biometric mustering had ended in October 2020.
A total of 3.5 lakh ineligible persons skipped the mustering which helped the government save `55 crore a month. In 2018, the government had removed the names of 24,000 deceased persons by cross-checking the data on death registrations with the civic bodies.