BISP Removed 2.25 Million Fake Beneficiaries in a Year, Government Tells NA

The Ministry of Poverty Alleviation and Social Safety Division told the National Assembly that the Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP) removed 2,259,404 beneficiaries it identified as fake or ineligible between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026, and suspended payments to more than 800,000 others pending further checks.

Officials gave the figures during question hour in the National Assembly on Friday, in response to a lawmaker's query about fraud and leakage in the programme, which pays cash stipends to low-income households and is Pakistan's largest social safety net.

What the ministry disclosed

Alongside the removal and suspension figures, the ministry said an audit had separately identified 140,488 government employees and their family members as BISP beneficiaries during 2019-20, a category the programme's eligibility rules bar entirely. The Nation reported that the ministry put total recoveries from fake and ineligible beneficiaries at more than Rs712 million, of which over Rs545 million came through the Federal Investigation Agency and more than Rs21 million was recovered from BISP's own staff.

The ministry also told the House it had received 55,579 complaints in the previous fiscal year alleging unauthorised deductions, embezzlement and misappropriation connected to BISP funds, and said inquiries into those complaints are under way.

Why the numbers are this large

BISP has struggled for years with beneficiary lists built up faster than they could be verified, a gap that past governments have tried to close through periodic data-matching exercises against databases such as NADRA's and government payroll records. The scale disclosed this week, more than two million removals in a single year, suggests the current verification drive is considerably larger than the hundreds of thousands removed in earlier clean-up rounds, though the ministry's statement to the Assembly did not explain what changed in its detection methods to produce the larger number.

The disclosure lands as BISP expands its reach: the programme now feeds into broader financial-inclusion efforts tied to Pakistan's IMF programme, which has pushed for better-targeted social spending as the government works to keep a lid on the fiscal deficit while protecting the poorest households from inflation that remains well above the State Bank's target band.

What this means for genuine beneficiaries

The ministry's statement did not say how a household wrongly suspended can appeal, beyond noting that verification is ongoing. BISP has separately warned the public to treat any message about stipends or enrolment that does not come from its official short-code, 8171, as fraudulent, after scammers have used fake texts promising payments to extract personal information from applicants and recipients.

For households that depend on BISP's quarterly Kafalat stipend or its education and nutrition payments, the removal drive carries a practical risk alongside its anti-fraud purpose: anyone caught in a suspension pending review loses a payment they may still be entitled to until the ministry resolves their case, with no published timeline for how long that process takes.

What to watch

The ministry did not say whether further rounds of removals are planned for the current fiscal year, or how many of the suspended 800,000-plus beneficiaries have since been reinstated after verification. Parliament's question-hour record gives a one-year snapshot; whether the pace of removals continues at a similar scale will only be clear when the ministry next reports figures to the Assembly or in BISP's annual report.

Build Better Pakistan's Economy Desk is tracking BISP's verification drive and will follow up as further figures are disclosed.