Business Briefs
The National Pension Commission, PenCom, has developed the Enhanced Contributor Registration System, ECRS, to facilitate the enrolment of participants in the Micro Pension Scheme when the scheme is rolled out. Aisha Dahir-Umar, acting director general, PenCom, said the ECRS was developed to clean-up data in the Contributory Pension Scheme, CPS.
Dahir-Umar, who spoke in Calabar, recently said the clean-up will enable the commission to not only facilitates the enrolment of participants in the Micro Pension Scheme, but to also facilitate the transfer of Retirement Savings Account, RSA, holders from one Pension Fund Administrator, PFA, to another.
She stressed that the Micro Pension Scheme will take off fully once the ECRS is fully tested and deployed. She disclosed that the commission released the guidelines on micro pension, the first step in giving effect to Section 2(3) of the Pension Reform Act (PRA), 2014, which provides that employees of organizations with less than three employees as well as the self-employed persons shall be entitled to participate in the CPS in accordance with the guidelines issued by the commission.
“PenCom, in accordance with the PRA 2014, introduced the Micro Pension Plan. The plan is set to include the self-employed and persons working in organisations with less than three employees. It aims at ensuring that the informal sector participants save towards their old age. It is also expected that the plan would expand the coverage of pension contributors by an estimated 30 million people by the year 2024. This category of workers constitutes a large percentage of the working population in the country.
“To implement this initiative, the Commission segmented informal sector into three broad categories namely; the low-income earners, the high-income earners and the small & medium scale enterprises (SMEs). Each of these categories will be targeted with appropriate pension products and sensitisation programmes that meet their various peculiarities.
“The Commission has recently exposed the draft guidelines and framework on Micro Pension Plan to its stakeholders and the general public for comments and observations and is on the verge of finalizing the guidelines and framework. In addition to the exposed draft guidelines and framework, the Commission is working on the IT infrastructure that will support the launch of the Micro Pension Plan,” she said.
– Oct. 19, 2018 @ 19:15 GMT |
Tags: PenCom enhances Enrolment into Micro Pension Scheme with New IT Infrastructure
