Chitral Times Report
ISLAMABAD: Chairperson BISP, Dr Sania Nishtar chaired 30th meeting of BISP Board at BISP Secretariat today. It was 1stBISP Board meeting since she assumed office of the Chairperson in October 2018. The meeting was attended by Omar Hamid Khan, Secretary BISP andalong with following Board members: Mr. Qazi Azmat Isa, Mr Zafar A Khan, Mr. Atif Bajwa, Dr Ishfaq Hassan Khan, Mir Alam Khan- DG Legal NADRA, Mr. Arif -Senior Joint Secretary, Inter-provincial Coordination, M Bilal Khan-Financial Advisor, Finance Division and Mujtaba Hassan -Joint Secretary, Economic Affairs Division. In her introductory remarks, the Chairperson briefed the board and shared her views about the legacy issues of the organization that include; 1) Politicization in the past 2) the payment process issues 3) weaknesses in process design with banks 4) Point of Sale (POS) retailer issues which lead to irregularities 5) cases of past audit paras and FIA enquiries. Welcoming the government’s decision to keep BISP apolitical, she assured of her commitment to reform the operational working of the organization in a more transparent way. This includes; Risk assurance and management, tightly bound work plans for the stakeholders involved, greater transparency within organization and development of strategic plan to set organizational direction with corresponding programmatic design documents, tools and measures, she maintained. Secretary BISP, while acknowledging the participation of all board members said that we want to run the organization in more transparent way with zero tolerance for corruption. We have plugged many loopholes in the previous system and will continue to improve the mechanism, as per the able guidance of Chairperson. Secretary added. The 10 points agenda of the 30th board meeting included Payment regulation, Unconditional Cash Transfer (UCT), revised De-crediting and re-crediting policies, Ex post facto approval banking contracts extension till , review of the programs in pipeline regarding Graduation including Business Incubation for Self Employment (BISE) and Direct Cash Model (DC) , Conceptual framework on nutrition, BISP employees Service Regulations 2018, Budget for the fiscal year 2017-18 and 2018-19, Error, Fraud and Corruption framework and re-constitution of all board sub-committees. On the agenda of payment regulation, the board accorded approval on the draft payment regulation, BISP 2018 for the Unconditional (UCT) and Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT). The board directed to send the Payment Regulations to Finance Division for vetting and notifying. The board agreed to the management’s proposal regarding revision in De-crediting Policy; and decided that accounts of the beneficiaries having no withdrawal activity for six months may be blocked and de-credited from the existing one year period. Similarly, accounts of deceased beneficiaries and dubious CNICs holders may be forced de-credited as soon as possible. Among the other agenda items, BISP budget for the fiscal year 2017-18 was approved; BISP employee service regulations 2018 were also discussed in the 30thboard meeting. It was decide that the Service Regulations will be send to Finance Regulations wing for further review.
