(Business in Cameroon) - In Cameroon, the Ministry of Finance just published a list of 7,855 former civil servants suspected of fraudulently receiving reversionary and invalidity pensions. This publication falls in line with the government’s ongoing operation to sanitize its payroll.

“(...) An operation to collect the documents constituting the rights relating thereto was carried out at the issuing administrations, with a view to removing the fraudulent beneficiaries of the said pensions from the payroll. At the end of this operation, the documents of 7,855 pensioners from the current payroll could not be found. This casts doubts on the legitimacy of the rights they continue to receive,” the Minister of Finance, Louis Paul Motaze, explains in an official release signed on January 8, 2020.

 “However, in order to limit the litigation that could arise from the direct suspension of the payment of the said pensions, the interested parties are requested to imperatively submit a copy of the act attributing the pension to them, at the nearest treasury directorate, by Friday 20 March 2020,” the official continued. “After this deadline, the said pensions will be suspended and measures to recover the sums already collected will be taken against them,” the Finance Minister added. 

The reversionary pension is a portion of pension a deceased civil servant could have been receiving if he/she was alive. It is paid to his/her beneficiaries. As for disability pension, it is granted to persons who are unable to work permanently or temporarily due to a disability.

The hunt for fraudulent pensioners thus launched by the Ministry of Finance is in continuation of the Physical Counting operation conducted between April and June 2018, in order to remove undue employees (abandonment of post, death, etc.) from the country’s payroll.

According to the Ministry of Finance, the operation helped remove more than 10,000 fictitious civil servants from the state payroll, for an annual budgetary savings of about XAF30 billion. In 2019, these savings amounted to XAF3 billion per month, we learn.

Brice R. Mbodiam