Minister blames slow pace of SSSS implementation on workers

Accra, Dec. 10, GNA - Employment and Social Welfare Minister, Mr Enoch Teye Mensah, has blamed the slow pace of mapping and migration of various organisations on the Single Spine Salary Structure (SSSS) on the reluctance of some institutions to submit data for the exercise. This, he said, was because some of these institutions did not have evidence of approval for some of their current allowances from the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning.

Besides unauthorised use of internally generated funds by some institutions to pay allowances not approved by the Finance Ministry was another major reason, since there were fears that the disclosure of these unapproved payments would lead to their withdrawal by the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission.

Addressing the turn of his ministry at the Meet-the- press series in Accra on Thursday he said: "This situation has created the impression that the Commission and for that matter government, is delaying the implementation because of budgetary constraints. This is absolutely not true," he said.

Mr Mensah said while more than 100 human resource and accounting focal persons in 95 institutions had been trained to undertake the mapping of their employees, only 28 had completed the process. He said the Commission had noted that some institutions had genuine challenges and was working with them to resolve the issues to permit their migration onto the new salary structure. Mr Mensah said government had no intention to postpone the implementation to 2011, saying five more institutions would receive salaries based on the new struct ure this month to bring the total number of SSSS beneficiaries to 19.

Mr Mensah said the Commission was currently facilitating discussions on the consultants report on the standardisation and harmonisation of categories two and three allowances within the nine service classifications.