MDAs partly responsible for delays in salary payments - Sottie

Tamale, Aug 1, GNA - Mr. Christian Tetteh Sottie, Controller and Accountant General (CAG), has said Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) were partly responsible for the delay in the payment of salary arrears and other entitlements of workers. He said payroll processing officers of the MDAs either failed to process or submit on time data on the promotion of officers to the Controller and Accountant Generals Department (CAGD) to enable the Department to input them into the pay structure. The MDAs, he said, sometimes also committed data errors.

Mr. Sottie was speaking at a workers' forum organised by the CAGD in Tamale on Wednesday to explain problems relating to the delays in the payment of salaries, salary deductions and other technical issues facing the Department. "Anytime promotions were keyed on behalf of an employee, the grade and step of the particular officer automatically erase to allow for updating but when it is not updated or recaptured the system automatically rejects any arrears computation for the officer concerned", he said.

The Controller said he had the occasion to visit the Ministry of Health (MOH) and the Ghana Education Service (GES) and found out that many officers who had been promoted had not had their inputs from their various departments submitted to the CAGD for the necessary adjustments to be made to their salaries. On the issue of wrongful deductions from workers salaries, Mr. Sottie said investigations had proved that some workers use their colleagues' pay slips to purchase goods and therefore urged workers to "jealously guard" their pay slips.

Explaining the delays in the payment of salaries, Mr. Sottie said the problem was mainly due to the switch from the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Database (IPPD 1) to (IPPD 2) and power outages. Mr. Sottie said the Department had installed a new generator and had since been meeting its target payment dates. He urged workers to always contact the CAGDs when they had problems concerning their salaries instead of resorting to radio stations and demonstrations. "A delay in your payment equally affects us. A lot of sacrifices are made by the staff of the Department including foregoing weekends and statutory holidays to work on payroll to ensure payment on schedule", Mr. Sottie said.