Expat pensioners in Sri Lanka to be registered

Steps are being taken to register all Sri Lankan pensioners who live abroad by the country’s Department of Pensions. The pensions of individuals who do not respond to the Department’s queries will be temporarily suspended from January 2009.

Director General of Pensions K.A. Thilakaratne said that there are over 25,000 pensioners living abroad.

“Pensioners mainly live in five countries; Australia, India, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. In these countries there are over 18,000,” he said. “Out of the 25,000 almost 20,000 take their pensions via a commercial bank, and most of these accounts are joint accounts. In recent times we have discovered that there is a lot of cheating going on.

“So this step was taken to stem such activities,” he added.

Although the pensioners are required to send these banks a life certificate certified by a lawyer or the Sri Lankan mission in the respective countries, many banks do not strictly adhere to this practice, continued Thilakaratne. This poses a major issue since the Department of Pensions now send the pensions to their accounts directly, especially in the USA.

In order to fill this loophole the Department of Pensions is trying to distribute pensions through Sri Lankan missions abroad, so that there are minimal chances of cheating. Currently there are three ways that the pensioners can get their salaries abroad: “One is through the crowned agent who charged us £5.50 for each pension he handled. We stopped that system from this year. The other method was the pension allowance paid to approximately 500 people in Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. And the other method is through commercial banks,” said Thilakaratne.

“The problem is that we have not done a proper assessment of the pensioners who reside abroad. We don’t even have the addresses of over 80% and even the addresses we have are quite outdated,” he said. “So we have decided to hold a census on all pensioners who live abroad. I have already sent 500 data entry forms but only 77 have been returned,” he added.