PESHAWAR: With the assistance and approval of the finance department, the Accountant General Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has released the expected monthly pensions for the newly retiring government employees.

This is a type of advance pension, the sole purpose of which is to facilitate the retiring employees as immediately after retirement their salaries were stopped, according to a statement issued here on Wednesday.

It said submission, scrutiny, approval and payment of pensions took too much time.

According to this procedure, the retiring employees reaching the age of 60 years or those retiring before 60 years will get 65 per cent of interim pension of their last basic pay.

It is worth mentioning here that due to a March 2020 decision of the Peshawar High Court against the three-year extension in the service period of government employees, more than 2,000 officials had retired throughout the province, but their salaries were stopped, causing them problems as they could not settle pension cases due to closure of government offices following enforcement of the lockdown.

The expected monthly pension of almost 2,200 employees has been sent to their bank accounts, the statement said.

Published in Dawn, May 21st, 2020