The Auditor General of Pakistan (AGP) has unearthed fraud, embezzlement, and irregularities worth around Rs. 13 billion in the Benazir Income Support Program (BISP).
The audit report on the accounts of the poverty alleviation and social safety division for the year 2021-22 found 28 cases, involving an amount of around Rs. 13 billion, where fraudulent activities, non-recovery, irregular payments, unauthorized payments, and undue favors were observed.
AGP observed fraudulent activity by some franchises amounting to Rs. 2.723 billion. Suspicious withdrawal activities in cases of some Biometric Verification System (BVS) franchises and ATMs, such as more than one transaction occurring exactly at the same time, more than two transactions within one minute, up to 1,000 transactions in one day and withdrawals up to Rs. 235 million in one BVS in one financial year were reported in the BISP Management Information System (MIS).
AGP is of the view that these suspicious withdrawals need to be investigated to fix responsibility and recover fraudulent withdrawals from culprits.
The report observed irregularity and non-compliance for non-discrediting of beneficiaries’ accounts involving an amount of Rs. 2.227 billion. Management of BISP enrolled and served 6.90 million and 6.75 million beneficiaries, respectively under regular BISP conditional and unconditional cash transfers (UCT and CCT) during the financial year 2020-21. The audit observed that beneficiaries’ accounts were not de-crediting during the period from 01-11-2020 to 30-06-2021.
AGP said that no approval from the board was available to halt the de-credit of accounts of beneficiaries. It also said that such non-de-crediting of accounts and onward non-deposit of de-credited amounts into the government treasury was a loss to the government exchequer.
The report noted that non-monitoring by BISP resulted in the over-utilization of funds shown by the World Food Programme (WFP) in an annual report amount of $5.028 million. The audit also observed that data monitoring has not been carried out as the cost of the total sachet distributed comes to $841,252 up to 31-3-201 as per BISP-MIS. Whereas utilization of $5,869,421 under the expenditure head “food and related cost” was communicated to BISP.
The management of BISP Islamabad created 882 posts of compliance monitors at lump sum packages of Rs. 43,000 per month and paid Rs. 168,345,182 during the year 2020-21 to compliance monitors who joined their duties. AGP also noted that the creation of posts during the ban was irregular.
Other paras include; non-adjustment of saving of 1st year in budget releases of next year –Rs. 415.104 million, irregular payment of cash transfers to government employees/pensioners and their spouses –Rs. 369.636 million, non-recovery of penalty from the survey firm due to less deployment of enumerators –Rs. 360.765 million, irregular enrolment of beneficiaries under the National Socio-Economic Registry (NSER) not meeting the eligibility criteria of proxy means test (PMT) score –Rs. 149.172 million, payment to ineligible beneficiaries Rs. 26.15 million, irregular payment of cash transfer to government employees/pensioners and their spouse –Rs. 146.784 million.
