Even as it opens up its doors for all citizens on Friday, over five years after the new pension scheme became mandatory for central government employees, the contribution records for them are yet to be fully transferred to the scheme?s record-keeper. Moreover, Pay and Account Offices across the country are still struggling to submit details about workers? retirement fund contributions in the required format.
In fact, up till April 18, the National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL), which is the appointed central record-keeping agency (CRA), had received erroneous details on pension contributions amounting to Rs 77 crore, from 2,093 Pay and Accounts Offices (PAO) across the country.
As part of the record-keeping exercise, after they transfer new civil servants? pension contributions to the NPS bankers, the PAOs have to upload these details on to NSDL?s system. But despite two years of training and capacity-building of the PAOs, they are still unable to correctly upload the transaction code or number given by the NPS bankers upon depositing the pension contributions.
As a result, while NSDL does receive records of pension contributions by the PAOs, for some of these, it does not have details of who contributed them or the details don?t tally with those provided by the NPS banker. Such mismatches on the CRA?s system prevent it from processing the details further.
?It?s a new system ? the PAOs and the banks are still learning how to do it. But it is being rectified. We have put out the list of defaulters to ensure that it gets corrected soon,? an NSDL official said.
The largest defaulter is the ministry of defence, in particular the PAOs of the Indian Army, with 495 transaction entries that have not matched. Ironically, the ministry of finance, which is working closely with NSDL on the NPS, has the dubious distinction of having the second highest number of faulty entries.
PAOs of the finance ministry have entered 250 mismatched data files. Close on its heels for faulty data entries are the ministry of home affairs (210), ministry of water resources (111), ministry of urban development (97) and ministry of railways (90).
The NPS for civil servants also continues to be plagued by its earlier problem of incomplete legacy data. Despite getting two extensions, the Comptroller General of Accounts (CGA), which was acting as the interim record-keeper for the NPS is yet to transfer the account records of all employees under the scheme to the NSDL. Of the 4.5 lakh employees under the NPS, records of about 4.3 lakh employees have now been transferred. Without the actual transfer of records, employees will neither be able to verify their account balances nor the returns thereon.
The CGA was originally asked to transfer all the data by June 2008, which was later extended by three months. Now, the NSDL has not set a new deadline for it to transfer the records. Instead it is pursuing individual ministries to transfer the records at the earliest. ?We are hopeful that the remaining legacy data will be transferred in the next month or two,? the official said.