diff --git a/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/huggingface/auto_tokenizer.py b/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/huggingface/auto_tokenizer.py
index 85f9af6e3df2..9340b1f7c504 100644
--- a/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/huggingface/auto_tokenizer.py
+++ b/nemo/collections/common/tokenizers/huggingface/auto_tokenizer.py
@@ -218,14 +218,20 @@ def vocab(self):
 
     @property
     def pad_id(self):
+        if getattr(self, 'pad_token') is None:
+            return None
         return self.tokens_to_ids([getattr(self, 'pad_token')])[0]
 
     @property
     def bos_id(self):
+        if getattr(self, 'bos_token') is None:
+            return None
         return self.tokens_to_ids([getattr(self, 'bos_token')])[0]
 
     @property
     def eos_id(self):
+        if getattr(self, 'eos_token') is None:
+            return None
         return self.tokens_to_ids([getattr(self, 'eos_token')])[0]
 
     @property
@@ -235,18 +241,26 @@ def eod(self):
 
     @property
     def sep_id(self):
+        if getattr(self, 'sep_token') is None:
+            return None
         return self.tokens_to_ids([getattr(self, 'sep_token')])[0]
 
     @property
     def cls_id(self):
+        if getattr(self, 'cls_token') is None:
+            return None
         return self.tokens_to_ids([getattr(self, 'cls_token')])[0]
 
     @property
     def unk_id(self):
+        if getattr(self, 'unk_token') is None:
+            return None
         return self.tokens_to_ids([getattr(self, 'unk_token')])[0]
 
     @property
     def mask_id(self):
+        if getattr(self, 'mask_token') is None:
+            return None
         return self.tokens_to_ids([getattr(self, 'mask_token')])[0]
 
     @property
diff --git a/scripts/nlp_language_modeling/preprocess_data_for_megatron.py b/scripts/nlp_language_modeling/preprocess_data_for_megatron.py
index d347febd55d6..fa7acfdfe783 100644
--- a/scripts/nlp_language_modeling/preprocess_data_for_megatron.py
+++ b/scripts/nlp_language_modeling/preprocess_data_for_megatron.py
@@ -309,7 +309,7 @@ def main():
             output_bin_files[key],
             impl=args.dataset_impl,
             chunk_size=args.chunk_size,
-            pad_id=tokenizer.pad_id if hasattr(tokenizer, "pad_id") else 0,
+            pad_id=tokenizer.pad_id if getattr(tokenizer, "pad_id", None) is not None else 0,
             retrieval_db=args.retrieval_db,
             vocab_size=tokenizer.vocab_size,
             stride=args.chunk_stride_size,