Controller and Accountant to freeze salaries of unvalidated employees
The Controller and Accountant-General Department (CAGD) has warned that it will freeze the salaries of all heads of Department who fail to validate their staff on the Electronic Salary Payment Vouchers (E-SPV) effective August 2017.
Also, all employees whose data are not validated on the E-SPV would also not be paid their August salary.
The CAGD says it would also stop salaries of employees declared “unknown” but not “Missing” on the pay voucher.
“We are going to ensure that no validation no Pay in August”, Mr Eugene Ofosuhene, Controller and Accountant-General noted.
Speaking at a stakeholders’ engagement on the E-SPV in Accra on Thursday, Mr Ofosuhene, explained that the decision had been taken as part of effort to help sanitise the E-SPV system and make it more effective, efficient and ensure that the system was not compromised.
He said all Personnel Processing Sections (PPS) of the Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) should as a matter of urgency, update all employees data before the final payroll run.
He also entreated the heads of the MDAs to ensure that they updated the data of staff in real time so that all issues concerning posting and transfer, brought up by the validators were addressed within the same month.
The stakeholder engagement that was attended by heads of MDAs, heads of management units, human resource managers, chief directors, heads of accounts and PPS officers as well as employee unions, was to help reorient the participants on the importance of the E-SVP.
It was also to bring to the fore the challenges threatening the E-SVP and solicit their cooperation to address such challenges while affording MDAs and other stakeholders the opportunity to seek clarification on issues pertaining to the Payroll administration.
Mr Ofosuhene said the E-SVP is an electronic platform introduced in 2014 to aid the payment of the over 500, 000 government employees under a credible and efficient payroll management.
“It is also to ensure that the issue of ghost names and ‘unending salaries’ were brought to an end. It is expected to reduce the huge cost of government payroll,” he said.
He said the E-SVP was also introduced to address challenges of the manual Payment Voucher system that used to be in place as the CADG resolved to ensure prudent financial management through a number of intervention rolled out as part of the Public Financial Management Reforms.
He, however, noted that after the introduction of the E-SVP, many heads of Department continued to derail the processes by refusing to validate a good number of payment vouchers month after month.
He said for instance, from April to July this year, a total number of 78,724 of employees had salaries due for suspension because of their Heads of Department refusal to properly validate them.
He said had CAGD implemented its sanctions within the past months, all the over 78,000 employees would have not been paid their salaries for those months.
Mr Ofosuhene said additionally, an average of 5,000 of the payment vouchers remained un-validated each month.
He also expressed concern over the practice of some Heads of Department using the new pay system to withhold the salaries of their employees without due process, and warned such heads to desist from that act, saying “the E-SPV should not be used to the detriment of employees”.
The Controller and Accountant General noted that the CADG would continue to engage and reorient all stakeholders on the E-SPV system through to the last quarter of 2017 and also work closely with the Public Services Commission to ensure that all management units were cleaned and effectively populated before migration unto the human resource management information system.
He said CAGD would also set up a laboratory within its premises for the use by all validators who have challenges to be addressed.
Mr Daniel Azubila, Deputy Controller and Accountant General in charge of Payroll at CAGD said much investment had been put into the E-SPV programme and so there was the need for all stakeholders to collaborate to ensure that the right benefits were derived from the system.
“We want to start benefiting from the investment made into the E-SPV to help the government reduce it wage bill and have the rest invest into other useful purposes of national interest”.
He said: “goods and services of the public sector are mostly not paid because of over payment of salaries to ghosts. We should all help save monies so it could be channelled into goods and services”, Mr Azubila noted.
Source: GNA