The Afghan government and the General Directorate of Pension Treasury (GDPT) have taken several reform efforts to address identified vulnerabilities, a new report said on Sunday.
The report from the Independent Joint Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee (MEC) said GDPT was merged in the Ministry of Finance structure in February 2019.
Legal ambiguities between the Labor Law and the old Pension Regulation were mostly addressed through amendment to the Pension Regulation, making the legal framework more consistent, the report said.
The old, paper-based, Pension Registration Process was replaced by the new electronic system, simplifying the registration process from eight steps to four and significantly reducing the process time.
A one-stop-shop was established at the GDPT, to which new retirees refer only twice, once for submitting their documents and biometric registration and a second time for receiving their Pension ID Card.
All new retirees are biometrically verified, and the data is recorded electronically, 86 public institutions and 11 provinces are connected to the new pension registration system and submit their data electronically.
Of 165,641 retirees, 146.269 (88 percent) are already biometrically verified and registered in the new system.
The mentioned reforms were made possible with financial and technical support of World Bank’s “Afghanistan Pension Administration and Safety Net Project” which started in 2010 and took seven years.
The mentioned project also included trainings and workshops for the GDPT staff and other institutions on the new pension registration process as well as awareness raising sessions for retirees.
Earlier, MEC conducted a VCA of the Pension Payment Process for retirees in 2013 with the aim of identifying the extent of corruption vulnerabilities in the registration process of new retirees as well as in the benefit delivery process for the existing retirees.
The identified vulnerabilities in the GDPT included the following:
Vague, inconsistence and partly contradicting legislative documents, which left room for the GDPT’s employees to interpret and apply the legal documents at their discretion,
Overlapping responsibilities among different Directorates and Sub-Directorates,
Poor (paper-based) record keeping of the retiree’s data.
Lengthy and complicated Processes of claim handling and benefit delivery which were prone to undue influence of officials in the GDPT.
The legal ambiguity, structural overlaps and lengthy processes resulted in a widespread corruption- friendly environment in which corrupt networks were operating with fake IDs for “ghost” retirees. Real retirees, on the other hand, were experiencing intentional delays in the registration and payment processes as well as harsh, unprofessional and disrespectful treatment by the GDPT staff.
