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BISP audit flags Rs25bn paid on 600,000 CNIC casesPakistan
Auditors found payments of more than Rs25 billion linked to compromised identity records, and ordered recovery, tighter checks and verification.
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A government audit of the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) for the financial year 2024-25 has flagged payments of more than Rs25 billion linked to over 600,000 beneficiary cases in which identity records were compromised or missing. The audit reports, which have now been made public, point to serious weaknesses in how beneficiaries were profiled and verified.
According to reporting on the audit, the total financial exposure came to more than Rs25 billion across 601,850 compromised cases. The largest single problem was missing identity data: 596,252 beneficiaries were recorded without any spouse Computerised National Identity Card (CNIC), yet payments totalling Rs25.46 billion were still made in those cases.
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The audit also found cases in which one identity document was linked to several people. In 5,558 cases, a single spouse CNIC was linked to as many as seven different female beneficiaries, involving payments of Rs239 million. Such linked registrations raise obvious questions about duplicate or incorrect enrolment, and auditors called for independent checks on spouse relationships.
Payments to people who should not have qualified were another major finding. Under the Unconditional Cash Transfer programme, Rs515.7 million was paid to 12,078 government employees, pensioners or their spouses during 2024-25, despite a 2019 federal cabinet decision barring civil servants and their families from receiving BISP assistance.
Other irregularities were reported across different parts of the programme. The audit reported irregularities of Rs530 million in cases handled under the Proxy Means Test, and noted that Rs970 million due under Conditional Cash Transfers had not been recovered. It found that 7,020 women received Rs100 million through incorrect identification, in breach of programme rules. Separately, Rs130 million was paid as scholarships into benami accounts linked to five major universities, which the audit described as illegal payments, while irregularities of Rs1.79 billion were reported in Poverty Graduation funds.
The Departmental Accounts Committee has directed that ineligible beneficiaries be blocked immediately and that recovery operations begin. BISP has also been directed to sign a formal agreement with Pakistan Bait-ul-Mal for system-to-system data sharing to prevent duplicate payments, and to seek data clarifications from the National Database and Registration Authority (Nadra).
The findings matter because BISP is Pakistan’s flagship cash support programme for low-income households, and weak verification means money can miss the families it is meant to reach. The audit does not by itself establish criminal guilt against any individual; its observations point to system and control failures that the programme has now been told to fix. Whether the blocked cases, recoveries and new verification checks follow through will be the real test of this audit.
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