Daily Times

Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Accountability (SAPM) Shahzad Akbar Wednesday revealed names of 2,037 officials from grade 1 to 22 who were found receiving stipends of Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) unlawfully, one way or the other.

“In some cases, the officials were getting BISP stipends directly against their names, while some had got included their spouses in the list of beneficiaries,” he said, while addressing a news conference along with Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on Information and Broadcasting Dr Firdous Ashiq Awan. He said the government has referred cases of all such employees to the Federal Investigation Agency, adding that the government has also written to all chief secretaries and the Establishment Division for taking departmental action against and recovering funds from the government officers who benefited from the BISP. He said it was decided to ask the FIA to register criminal cases against the said officers and the people who assisted them in withdrawing the BISP funds because the expenditure was carried out from the federal budget. He said the names of government employees appeared on the list after a detailed data verification carried out by the BISP in collaboration with the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA). He said the government analysis has revealed that as many as 140,000 government employees or their spouses benefited from the BISP funds meant for the poor. A major chunk of the 140,000 people were government employees of grade 1 to 16 while the rest (2,037) were officers of grade 17 to 22. “This is a lack of transparency of the system and its regulations that this went on for years and the officers continued to withdraw money,” he said.

Giving a breakdown of the cases identified across the country, the SAPM said the number of government employees whose spouses fraudulently benefited from BISP was nine in Azad Kashmir and 40 in Gilgit-Baltistan. As many as 554 officers or their spouses benefited from the programme in Balochistan, 342 in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, 101 in Punjab and 938 in Sindh. A total of 39 employees of grade 1 to 16 and four officers of grade 17 and above who worked for BISP itself benefited from the programme. Among employees of the federal government, this number was 48.

Last month, Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Social Protection and Poverty Alleviation Dr Sania Nishtar had announced that the government had conducted forensic data analysis and identified 820,165 undeserving people who were availing the BISP assistance. She had said the government was ‘exiting’ those people from the programme, adding that this exercise would be conducted annually to weed out any beneficiaries who had achieved financial stability so that the funds could be disbursed to more deserving people.

Launched in July 2008, the federally funded BISP is Pakistan’s largest social safety net, catering to women and benefiting around 5.4 million people, according to data released in 2016.