The National Pension Commission (PenCom) has issued employers’ code to 198, 262organisations as at October13, 2014 to facilitate compliance with the provisions of the Pension Reform Act 2004 now amended as Pension Reform Act 2014.
Since PenCom had issued employers’ code to 192, 594 organisations as at December 31, 2013, it means employers’code was issued to5, 668 firmsduring the first nine months of the current year.
PenCom had in October 2013published the guidelines for employer code requests by Pension Fund Administrators (PFAs) setting out the procedures for code requests for both the public and private sector employers.
As section 45(a) of the Pension Reform Act 2004 stipulates that the PFAs shall open Retirement Savings Accounts for all employees and obtain Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) for the employees from PenCom, in order to do this, the employers whether from the Federal/State or the private sectors must first be recognised and issued with unique employer codes. The employees’ PINs are attached to their respective employer codes in PenCom’s database and are to be adopted only within the pension industry.
To start with, the PFAs are expected to cross-check new employer codes requests against their respective employer code databases before forwarding a request to PenCom for employer codes generation.
Thereafter, the PFAs will forward their requests for employer codes to PenCom using the dedicated employer code request e-mail Employercode_Request@pencom.gov.ng.
PFAs’ requests must be accompanied by scanned copies of the Certificates of Incorporation/Registration of Companies or Business name registrations.
As requests for employer codes generation are treated in batches, PenCom states that all requests sent between 8am and 2pm would be processed within 24 hours of receipt of request from PFAs, while any request sent after 2pm would be processed within 48 hours of receipt of the request.
A request in which the employer information is incomplete, or has any discrepancy between PFA submission and record(s) obtained from relevant government agencies in charge of registration/setting up of organisations shall be returned to the PFA via the dedicated employer code e-mail address as and when such is discovered with reason(s) for the rejection.
All successfully generated and uploaded employer codes would be forwarded to the PFAs’ designated personnel through the mailing list as provided by each PFA.
Source : Independent