Fair Wages C’ssion begins phase 3 of payroll monitoring

The Fair Wages and Salaries Commission has started its third phase of payroll monitoring to ensure that public sector workers rightly earn their keep.

During the four weeks of the exercise, the commission will be conducting data and physical verification of employees in the Central, Western, Volta, Oti and Greater Accra regions.

It will cover those working in the education (tertiary and non-tertiary), health and local government sectors, the three largest sectors of the public sector payroll managed by the Controller and Accountant General’s Department.

Context

The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC), Benjamin Arthur, disclosed this in an interview with the Daily Graphic after an engagement with news editors of various media houses.

The exercise, being done in collaboration with the Internal Audit Agency (IAA), was to ensure that workers on public sector payroll reported for work as required and also worked without idling he said.

Mr Arthur explained that the audit was also aimed at sanitising the public sector payroll system by identifying infractions and stamping out anomalies to ensure that fairness and equity prevailed in the salary administration of the public sector.

Some of the areas to critically look at are striking out names of employees who had exited the public service but still on the payroll, as well as striking out sanctioning employees who do not deserve to be on the roll.

The exercise is part of the mandate of the commission under salary administration which enjoins it to “develop and monitor allowances and benefits of public servants and the consolidation of salaries of public servants.”

Validation

The CEO of the FWSC explained that the first stage was to gather data on employees and the second and third stages were to verify the data, in most cases. “We started with the University of Ghana and have done so for the University of Cape Coast and some technical universities. We were able to complete some of them entirely, but for others, we have to go back and verify,” he stated.

“We have done verification for the Accra Technical University and the exercise was very helpful,” Mr Arthur stated. The Fair Wages and Salaries Commission CEO said when they complete the exercise in the five regions, the officers would head for other regions.

He explained that the exercise was typically a collaborative work with the entities as opposed to the commission acting as a ‘police’ over them, having sensitised and given the entities the opportunity to do the payroll monitoring themselves ahead of the arrival of the commission’s officers.

Savings

The CEO of the FWSC disclosed that the monitoring during the first and second phases of the exercises between April to September last year led to a significant reduction in the number of employees on the payroll, leading to savings of about GH¢198 million.

Some of the issues found were genuine disparities of people being wrongly placed, with instances where employees had been promoted but did not know about them, hence were not earning the salaries of their new ranks.

Others bordered on incidents where people retired but remain on the payroll for a number of months before they were removed, especially in cases where the institutions were not on the public sector payroll.

The commission also found cases where people were not at post at all and others were in their districts but would not report to the office for work, but rather pursued other personal businesses.

Commendation

Mr Arthur commended the Controller and Accountant General’s Department for an efficient validation exercise, adding that with the use of the Ghana Card, the system would further minimise some of the anomalies as an individual could only have one identity, which the card helped to establish.