The total assets under the Retirement Savings Account with the National Pension Commission (PENCOM) currently stands at N14.5 trillion, the Director General of the commission, Aisha Dahir Umar, has said.
The PENCOM boss gave the figure when members of the House Committee on Finance queried the commission about the huge expenditure it spent on personnel cost of about N14 billion in 2022 alone.
The committee also asked the Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning to debit the accounts of agencies that failed to appear before it for scheduled interactive sessions on the Medium Term Expenditure Framework and Fiscal Strategy Paper.
It said whatever the Fiscal Responsibility Commission (FRC) finds in the accounts of the agencies should be treated as outstanding debts to the government.
Umar, who was presenting the MTEF projection of the commission on the last day of its sitting, said: “The total asset under management is now N14.5 trillion, made up of three funds: the retirement savings account fund, the Closed Pension Fund Asset (CPFA) and the Assets in Existing Scheme.
“Out of the N14.5 trillion, the RSA Fund is about N11 trillion, the CPFA has N1.5 trillion and the AES has about N1.4 trillion. These funds are in the accounts of the contributors. It is not being kept by PENCOM; it is not being kept by the pension fund administrators (PFAs). It is not anywhere but in the account of the contributors, just like the commercial banks.”
The PENCOM boss explained that the commission was established as a regulator of the pension industry and has the core mandate of regulating and supervising every pension activity in the country and therefore not a revenue generating agency.
Reacting to claims by the FRC that PENCOM had been listed as a government revenue agency, Umar said: “If they have put us on the schedule, we have not been advised. In 2017, PENCOM, as a responsible citizen, decided to be paying surplus, even though it was not on the list. And each time we pay, we get commendation from the Ministry of Finance. So, even when we were not asked to pay, we paid.
“I want the committee to know that long before the Ministry of Finance included PENCOM on its list, it was not a revenue-generating agency. By the provisions of the establishment Act, all incomes earned from investments earned from the Retirement Savings Account are credited back to the RSA of the contributors. Nobody takes a single kobo from it…”
Source: TheNation
