Audit report exposes irregular BISP payments worth Rs.25 billion
Noticeable anomalies have been arising in Pakistan’s Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) once an audit report for the financial year 2024-2025 was reviewed in 2025-2026.
An official review of BISP’s accounts found serious issues in how money or processes were handled during 2024-2025
Several expenditures worth Rs.25 billion have been uncovered. Sources suggest that payments were issued to individuals with duplicate records, as well as to ineligible beneficiaries such as government employees, pensioners, and vehicle owners.
The review suggested that the structure used to maintain and verify beneficiaries in the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) had major defects.
A few causes that might have led to such severe transgressions seem to be poor supervision, weaknesses in how people were checked and recorded (profiling systems).
How the overall program was managed (governance mechanisms), and how data was handled in the BISP Management Information System (BISP-MIS)
These inconsistences consequently led to payments being made incorrectly in 601,850 cases.
What further amplifies the situation is the fact that the total amount of money involved in Irregular BISP Payments was more than Rs. 25 billion.
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According to the audit findings, weaknesses in profiling systems, governance mechanisms, and the BISP Management Information System (BISP-MIS) led to irregular payments in 601,850 cases.
Serious issues in how information about beneficiaries’ spouses was collected and recorded have been revealed.
These distortions and inconsistency in the data enabled numerous people to be wrongly included in the program even ones who should not have been eligible.
The breakdown of the irregular payments is as such:
Serving government employees: 681 serving employees received Rs. 25.29 million (about 4.9%)
Spouses of serving employees: 9,211 spouses received Rs. 405.34 million (about 78.6%)
Pensioners: 240 pensioners received Rs. 8.11 million (about 1.6%)
Spouses of pensioners: 1,954 spouses received Rs. 76.97 million (about 14.9%).
The continuous gaps in the profiling of spouses’ data, which contributed to widespread inclusion errors.
Rs. 515.712 million under BISP’s Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT) programme was allocated to 12,078 people, including government employees, pensioners, and their spouses during the fiscal year.
Be that as it may, it violated an apparent regulation issued by the federal cabinet on December 24, 2019, which clearly goes against any government employee or their relative receiving any kind of benefits from this scheme.
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Majority of the irregular payments, (which were nearly 79% of the total Rs. 405.34 million) went to spouses of serving government employees. Whereas, the expenditures to higher-grade employees and their spouses were comparatively small.
