Pension: PenCom Fines Employers, Recovers N15.31bn Unremitted Pensions
The National Pension Commission has recovered N15.31bn from defaulting employers, who failed to remit the pension deductions of their workers into the Retirement Savings Accounts of workers.
The commission is also prosecuting recalcitrant employers who failed to remit its employees’ pension contribution into their RSAs.
As at date, PenCom disclosed that it had instituted legal actions against 167 recalcitrant employers.
“Out of that number, 78 had opted to settle out of court with the commission, 34 Judgments have been obtained while 23 are at different stages in the courts,” it stated.
The acting Director General, PenCom, Mrs Aisha Dahir-Umar, said the recovery exercise which had been largely successful had boosted the confidence of contributors and by extension encouraged non-participating employees/employers to embrace the Scheme.
She said, “Through this initiative, the sum of N15.31bn representing the principal contribution of N7.85bn and penalty N7.46bn has been recovered from defaulting employers.
“Both the principal contributions and penalty have been credited into the workers’ Retirement Savings Accounts. The penalty is meant to compensate for the income that would have been earned if the contributions were remitted as and when due.”
To ensure compliance by employers of labour with respect to remittance of pension contributions, the commission had in line with the provision of the Pension Reform Act 2014, developed a framework for recovery of outstanding pension contributions with penalties from defaulting employers, she explained.
Based on the framework, the acting director-general said the commission had engaged recovery agents for continuous enrolment into the Contributory Pension Scheme and recovery of unremitted pension contributions plus penalties from defaulting employers.
She said the commission had a fully functional complaints monitoring and resolution team attending to complaints on non/late/under-remittance of pension contributions into employees RSAs.
The team, she added, had a regime of sanctions which guided the administrative steps to be taken when complaints were received.
“The process followed in the regime of sanctions are letter of advice, caution letter, sanction letter and legal action,” she noted.
Dahir-Umar urged employees to forward to the commission the names and addresses of employers that were not in compliance with the provisions of the PRA 2014.
