Ghost beneficiaries haunt BISP

Official action against fraud in progress

ISLAMABAD: Zulekhan Bibi bagged Rs57,750 from accounts of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) in last four years. But who is Zulekhan Bibi? The National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) investigation teams could not know her whereabouts.

She is one of over 125,714 ghost beneficiaries who bagged over Rs3.3 billion from taxpayers' money under this internationally recognised social security programme from 2012-2015. Her name was included to the list of beneficiaries in Thatha (Sindh) in 2012, the district with majority (over 10,126) ghost beneficiaries, revealed official documents exclusively obtained by The News.

“It has been observed that 125,714 beneficiaries were identified as wrong updates by the management -- until then, Rs3.3 billion were transferred/disbursed to allegedly ineligible/ghost beneficiaries, thus causing a huge loss to the exchequer,” read the documents prepared by the Ministry of Finance, Nadra and BISP Islamabad administration.

Findings came months after the BISP administration requested Nadra, National Accountability Bureau (NAB) and Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) to weed out ghost beneficiaries across the country.

Around 55,772 (45%) ghost beneficiaries were identified in Sindh, 43,680 (26%) in Punjab, 13,719 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 6, 675 in Balochistan, 2,631 in FATA, 1,881 in Azad Jammu and Kashmir, 1, 050 in Gilgit-Baltistan and 314 in the Islamabad Capital Territory (ICT).

After Thatha with maximum number of ghost beneficiaries who bagged millions of rupees under this programme, 7,817 ghost beneficiaries were found in Karachi while 5,045 unregistered women benefited under this programme in Badin, revealed the record. Almost a similar case allegedly happened with an apparent flopped initiative called the Waseela-e-Haq Programme (WeH) under which the then chairman BISP Enver Baig was forced by certain quarters he did not want to reveal to resign after he ordered the FIA to probe mismanagement into this programme in 2014.

Over Rs2.2 billion were released to some 16,425 beneficiaries under WeH programme where the FIA believed many of them were ghost beneficiaries, officials in Ministry of Finance, BISP and Nadra told The News. The FIA found nine of 53 ghost beneficiaries in the ICT but the probe was stopped further by the government, as what the BISP senior officials said the programme was closed in 2014. “Yes, I was facing severe pressure from certain quarters to stop investigating BISP accounts -- I wanted to stop releasing direct monthly stipend to beneficiaries but failed to do so,” Baig said.

Official documents revealed that estimated Rs2.3 billion were released under flood relief package to the beneficiaries who were not even affected. The BISP top administration made irregular selection of partner organisation for conducting poverty scorecard survey in Balochistan for Rs158 million with 80% advance of total contract cost in violation of PPRA Rules 2004 to one organisation (name not mentioned), the documents revealed. The administration suffered losses worth Rs817 million when it paid this amount to Nadra for “data entry and verification” and media campaign on poverty survey public awareness without obtaining prior review and vetting of contract from the World Bank.

“This speaks of inefficiency, incompetence and lack of proper supervision and monitoring on the part of the entire hierarchy. To avoid ineligible/ghost beneficiaries, a process should be developed in which all the updates from regions are transmitted to head office where resources are deployed to check the updates with NADRA,” auditors advised BISP administration.

The BISP chairperson Marvi Memon, in her official response, pledged to clean the system last year, saying, “After the manual process, around 125,000 enrolments were marked as ‘suspected updates’ and accounts were suspended for further payments.”

“Two committees were constituted, one to oversee legal action against officials involved in ‘wrong updates’ and another to review the suspected cases, based on reports from the field and in light of documentary evidence, and give a final verdict on whether an individual update is wrong or not,” the BISP administration told The News.

So far, 75 show cause notices have been issued to different officials and legal action will be taken accordingly, pledged the administration. The Internal audit department is recently strengthened to ensure its effectiveness and improve transparency of the system. For Waseela-e-Haq Programme, payments to these beneficiaries have been stopped and a recovery mechanism is being devised, added the official reply.