Social Security Pension fraud: CAG had flagged issue in 2023 report

“Several thousands” of government servants, service pensioners and temporary employees who are ineligible for SSPs were “irregularly entered as beneficiaries”, CAG had reported last year

The Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) had drawn attention to the “irregular sanction” of social security pensions (SSP) to government employees and service pensioners in its performance audit report on the direct benefit transfer of SSP schemes tabled in the State Assembly last year.

The report had noted that “several thousands” of government servants, service pensioners and temporary employees were “irregularly entered as beneficiaries” and were receiving SSPs despite the stipulation that recipients of salary, pension or family pension from Central or State governments, retirees from Central or State PSUs and income tax payers cannot be eligible.

The CAG audit had found that social security pensions were ‘irregularly disbursed’ to 9,201 service pensioners and government employees. “The total amount thus disbursed as Social Security pensions to these ineligible persons for the three-year-period from 2017-18 to 2019-20 works out to ₹39.27 crore,” the report said, calling for urgent corrective action.

The report noted that there were government employees and service/family pensioners who were receiving SSPs from 2000. “If the irregular payment of SSPs from the year 2000 are also taken into account, the loss to the government would be huge,” it said.

Further, the report had noted that of the 9,201 employees and pensioners, 400 continued to receive SSPs even after their removal from the list of beneficiaries.

“Absence of proper control in the Sevana Pension software to check such ineligible beneficiaries during generation of bills and the laxity in proper verification and monitoring by the DBT Cell had resulted in loss of ₹0.10 crore to the government. More importantly, the absence of proper control in the software opens up the possibility of many more such cases occurring in future and escaping the government’s notice, leading to more such expenditure towards ineligible beneficiaries,” it said.

Published - November 29, 2024 08:23 pm IST