GES validates documents of 13,297 staff
The documents of 13,297 members of staff of the Ghana Education Service (GES) who applied for the payment of their salary arrears and other allowances have been validated by the Audit Service.
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The documents are part of the about 60,000 submitted by the GES for validation by a team put together by the Ministry of Education in response to earlier threats by teacher unions to embark on an industrial action to back their demand for the payment of their salary arrears and other allowances.
The Head of the Public Relations Directorate of the GES, Rev. Jonathan Bettey, who disclosed this to the Daily Graphic in an interview, explained that the validation exercise was in line with the Control Form designed by the Ministry of Finance for payment.
He explained that “a field exercise will be conducted later to confirm dates and the validity of documents provided, even though they have been validated prima facie”.
Ongoing validation
He said the documents released were part of the first batch of validated documents, that the exercise was still ongoing and that as soon as the officers covered a substantial number, they too would also be released.
He explained that the Audit Service had duly communicated to all the relevant bodies with regard to the validated documents and gave an assurance that payment for those validated would be effected as soon as the payment processes were finalised.
Rev. Bettey, therefore, called on all concerned beneficiaries to exercise restraint as everything was being done to successfully complete it.
Threat of strike
In February this year, teachers threatened to embark on an industrial action, which necessitated a three-day crunch meeting at the Ministry of Employment and Labour Relations between government representatives and teacher unions to find solutions to teachers’ concerns.
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At the end of that meeting, the two parties clinched a deal for the latter to call off their intended strike scheduled after Monday, February 29, 2016.
Off-site
The two parties and the Audit Service agreed to move off-site to validate all the data in respect of salary arrears and other allowances and submit a report on verified data to the government for payment.
The team validated the 2013/14 salary arrears of newly recruited teachers from the colleges of education.
While the validation was going on, the government appealed to teacher unions to suspend the intended strike, while the parties went off-site to validate the application forms for payment of not more than three months’ salary arrears.
More documents for validation
At the validation, it was realised that the magnitude of work was overwhelming. Initially, the GES had indicated that the number of forms available was about 14,000, out of which 7,000 had been validated and paid.
But when the work started, it was realised that the GES gave data showing that over 34,000 forms were to be validated.