NEW DELHI: The chief auditor of municipal accounts has found that the erstwhile Municipal Corporation of Delhi , and one of its successor bodies, North Delhi Municipal Corporation , paid a whopping Rs 1,942.82 crore pension over 18 years to their employees without finding out if the beneficiaries were still alive or not.The payments were made between 1998-99 and 2014-15 through Punjab National Bank and UCO Bank. The north corporation, justifiably, is alarmed.The erstwhile MCD had deposited large funds in the Chandni Chowk and Chawri Bazaar branches of PNB and UCO banks respectively. After trifurcation, north corporation opened new accounts in the Chandni Chowk and Chawri Bazaar branches and transferred funds.“The pension cell released funds amounting to Rs 471.95 crore during 1998-99 to 2004-05, Rs 162 crore during 2005-06 to 2006-07 and Rs 1,205.28 crore during 2007-08 to 2012-13 to PNB and UCO banks for disbursement to the pensioners,” the report said. The corporation again released Rs 103.59 crore to the two saving accounts in 2013-14 and 2014-15.“The banks have been furnishing statements of payments made to the pensioners regularly, but the department did not carry out any verification to ascertain as to whether the payments were made to bonafide pensioners or not,” the auditor’s report said.The auditors had brought the irregularities to the notice of the department in June 2015. But the department did not bother to reply, let alone initiate an inquiry.The auditors suspected that the payments may have been made to ghost pensioners and red-flagged the transactions for possible corruption—not a new thing as the Anti Corruption Bureau has been probing past cases of ghost pensions.A source in the finance department said inaction on the part of the civic body may have caused huge financial losses to it. “Dependants of pensioners often draw pensions even after their death,” the source said.AAP, which has claimed that the BJP-led corporations are in poor financial health due to corruption, said it would raise the matter in the House. “The corporations are synonymous with corruption. We will raise the matter in the House,” said Ashok Kumar, an AAP councillor.The opposition Congress has also questioned the silence of the corporations on this matter.North’s mayor Sanjeev Nayyar told TOI the civic body would study the report and initiate an inquiry.