Description of Project

The Pensions Record Office (PRO) otherwise known as by its Nepali name, “KaushiToshakhana”, under the Financial Comptroller General Office of the Government of Nepal, is responsible for the distributing of pensions to various types of government employees and maintaining accurate records of the disbursement of pensions. The PRO manages the disbursement of pensions to over 100,000 pensioners every month to pensioners from the Civil Service, Teachers, Nepal Police, Armed Police Force, Royal Palace and Constitutional Bodies. PRO is responsible for the identification of nearest bank branches for pensioners and issuing authorizations to the bank branch for the provision of monthly pension amount.

Retired employees (civil, teachers, police) after receiving a pension book issued by their respective record agencies appear at the PRO for identification of bank branches convenient to the pensioner for their pension withdrawals. The PRO enters a record of the nearest and convenient bank branch name and address in the pension book. Subsequently, the office sends an authorization letter to the bank requesting it to pay the pensioner the monthly pension amount as stated in the pension book. Once this process concludes, the pensioner then starts drawl of his/her’s pension amount from the bank.

On a monthly basis, each bank branch that pays the pensions sends a bank scroll to its respective Head Office in Kathmandu. The scroll contains the withdrawal details of the pensioners. The Bank Head Offices consolidates the scrolls and delivers it to the Nepal Rastra Bank (Central Bank) and claims payment. The Nepal Rastra Bank forwards the information to the Pension Office. After verification of the information, it makes payments to the Nepal Rastra Bank who then settles the account with the corresponding banks.

The PRO selected WorldLink to develop a system to maintain and manage the pensions system by automating the manual system of record keeping. The manual system was a slow and tedious system of maintaining pensioner information and disbursements. In fact, it was so slow that the PRO was on an average six (6) months behind in processing bank claims mainly due to the manual system of record keeping system.

The Pension System, based on WorldLink’s HR product Endeavor, has been designed and developed to replace the manual way of recording the information of retired employees. The system keeps track of the information like name of the ministry/body, department, office, and position from which he/she has retired. Similarly other information like salary, grade, and name of his/her nominee(s), Pension Identification Number are captured into the database.

The system includes a database of all bank branches of those banks authorized to disburse pensions, categorized by geographical locations. Each pensioner is associated with a bank branch. There are many different types of pensioners depending on different pension schemes they qualify for. Once this association is made, the pension amount is automatically generated. A letter to this effect is auto generated for each pensioner and provided to pensioner along with the Pension Book.

For the management of the disbursements, system maintains the pension amounts of each and every pension account accurately. This information is used for verification of disbursements using bank scrolls from each bank. The system accepts the figures that the bank has paid for each pensioner and checks this amount against the pensioner account. If the sum figure matches the due amount for the number of months indicated, it records the payment. If the figures provided by the bank do not correlate with the amount from pensioner account, the transaction is flagged for manual intervention.
In addition to normal pension transactions, the system also maintains a history of all pension policies that have a financial impact on the pension accounts. These include revisions to pay and pension policies in the services. Once changes are captured, the system automatically updates the accounts with the new amounts.

The system also comprehensively manages family pensions. The system maintains nominee(s), amount for each nominee, and the kind of family pension. Once a pensioner has been identified as deceased, the system creates a family pension account for each nominee with a new PIN. Each family pension account is linked to the main pensioner account and identified as a child account to the main pensioner account that is automatically locked once a family pension account has been created for it. The system thereafter will refuse to accept any pension disbursement for that pension account from the banks.