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NIMC, PenCom strengthen partnership for development

By BusinessNews Staff on August 5, 2015

The National Pension Commssion has said it will hasten the process of harmonising and integrating the PenCom database with the National Identity database to ensure complete synergy with the National Identity Management Commission.

The Director General, PenCom, Mrs. Chinelo Anohu-Amazu, stated this when the Director General/Chief Executive Officer of the National Identity Management Commission, Chris Onyemenam, visited PenCom headquarters to further review collaborations.

She said PenCom was a sister organisation to NIMC, saying, “Where we are now is a clear indication that we are working towards the same goal and must work together to ensure that our organisational roles and mandates are achieved seamlessly.”

She said that PenCom was poised to serve not only the pensioners of today, but the contributors to the various pension funds who are the pensioners of tomorrow.

“There has always been a great need for proper identification and verification in the pension industry to ensure little or no case of identity theft. It is a good thing that NIMC and PenCom are poised to make a positive impact and contribute to the country’s economy and development,” Anohu-Amazu said.

She also said, “The NIMC idea in PenCom’s estimation is a fabulous idea. Long before the inception of the highly structured pension industry that exists today, there has been a fundamental need for a foundation identity database which all the agencies and private organisations could fall back on at any given time, and we are glad that NIMC has put such structure on ground.”

According to her, PenCom is mandated by law to run its own functional database, but will also ensure that the PenCom database remains in harmony with the foundation database of NIMC.

“PenCom has regularly engaged and will continue to engage NIMC to ensure that we are in complete synergy with NIMC.”

“While managing PenCom’s functional database, we strive to continually take cues from NIMC’s expertise in identity management and we are indeed excited about the future as we continue to partner,” she said.

The Director General, NIMC, in his response, said that NIMC’s core mandate was identity management.

“The major reason for identity theft and fraud-related activity in the country is the lack of record keeping. Over the decades, Nigeria didn’t have an identity database, which made identity theft and fraud commonplace among Nigerians.”

He stated that many people were known to have multiple identities that they used for varied reasons. “This is costing the pension industry, the bank industry and the likes hundreds of millions of naira annually, thus the need for a central database to check the number of times people change their names and identities.”

The NIMC DG said that with the National Identity Database now in place, every individual who enrolled into the database was allowed to lie to the system just once; because once the details are captured, it is stored against the individual’s biometrics and headshot.

“And once this is done, in the next 20 years or more, the same details can be referred to with the help of the National Identification Number,”

“Cases of ghost workers, falsification of age and names, fraud, identity theft, etc., are some of the problems faced in our industry that will be curtailed and eliminated with a centralised identity database, replete with biometric information,” Onyemenam added.”

[Punch]

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