GH¢43m saved after clearing pension’s payroll – SSNIT

The Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) has saved a whopping GH¢43million as of April this year after deleting over 6,300 ghost pensioners from its payroll.

The Trust in February last year began an exercise to clean the pension’s payroll of ghost names in collaboration with the banks, which monitored dormant accounts over time and terminated those it deemed ghost pensioners.

Dr. John Ofori-Tenkorang, the Director-General of SSNIT who made this known, indicated that cleaning the pensions payroll formed part of the prudent internal and external management and cost-saving practices aimed at building a robust self-sustaining Scheme.

SSNIT has a total of 1,551,718 active contributors as of March 2019 and 205,094 pensioners on its payroll with the highest paid pensioner receiving GHS55,899.57 a month, while the minimum pension paid is GHS300.00.

Dr. Ofori-Tenkorang was speaking at an educational forum organised by SSNIT in collaboration with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) to discuss social security issues, particularly, on pensions and benefit computations.

It was aimed at promoting knowledge of the SSNIT Scheme, empowering organised labour as peer educators for the Trust and demystifying controversial issues surrounding computation of benefits to contributors.

Dr. Ofori-Tenkorang stressed that sustainability of the Scheme was very essential and urged all institutions to ensure that the Trust run efficiently and effectively.

He said the external actuarial valuation suggested that the contribution rate necessary to pay benefits over the next 50 years and to accumulate assets representing three years of total expenditure was around 19.2 percent.

Last year, he said the Trust spent GH¢2.5 billion on benefits payments and indicated that GH¢230million was being spent in funding pensions payment to over 200,000 pensioners monthly.

Dr. Ofori-Tenkorang added that more than one million Cedis was spent on Invalidity Pension every month, adding that SSNIT was committed to paying all legitimate claims.

He said there were no myths surrounding benefits computation and that, pensions were direct reflections of salaries on which contributions were paid, saying “with the SSNIT pension Scheme, what you put in is what you get”

He said SSNIT had embarked on an aggressive public education agenda to promote knowledge of the scheme among Ghanaians and that the Trust was leveraging on its large social media followers to educate and engage millennial.