Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said yesterday that government has uncovered about N1 billion paid to unidentified police pensioners every month.

The discovery was made after a biometric data exercise conducted on police pension fund, the minister said in Abuja at a press briefing on the 2012 budget breakdown.



"Due to some work by the tax force that is helping us on this issue of biometric exercise, from the Head of Service Office to the Police Pension Office, we have been able to bring down the amount paid to police pension from N1.5 billion to N.5 billion (N500 million) and we wish to continue because Mr. President wants this done, and we hope to use this as a vigorous tool of bringing down the recurrent expenditure," she said.

The minister also said that from next year, the civil service would be restructured to weed out ghost workers and pensioners.

"We are going to restructure agencies with overlapping and duplicating functions. We are going to look at our Commissions and Committee and see whether some of them are still needed. We are thinking of restructuring the government," she said.

The aim of the exercise, she said, was to reduce government's recurrent expenditure, which moved down from the current 74 percent of the entire budget to 72 percent in next year's budget.

She said that personnel cost paid to the MDAs constitute the bulk of the recurrent expenditure, and "it is not easy to drastically cut personnel cost because it touches on human being."

On the 2012 budget deficit estimated at 2.7 percent, the minister said it would be financed through borrowing of N794 billion, as against N852 billion borrowed to finance the 2011 budget deficit.

The borrowing will be in form of signature bonus, treasury bills and bonds, adding that proceeds from privatization would also be used to fund the deficit.

The implementation of the 2012 budget would give priority to the 6, 000 ongoing projects across the country and a 16-man team has been constituted to oversee the implementation.

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