Civil servants in ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) and local governments will this month receive delayed February salaries and pensions.

Catherine Bitarakwate the public service permanent secretary in a letter dated February 26, 2024, to all responsible officers in MDAs, said it would not be possible to pay salaries and pensions by February 28, 2024, due to a system upgrade.

"Under my letter of even reference dates February 1, 2024, you were informed of the Human Capital System (HCM) upgrade that was undertaken from February 2, 2024-February 5, 2024 to incorporate the system enhancements sanctioned for HCM phase 2 implementations," Bitarakwate said.

She revealed that, whereas the system update was completed and deployed, in the HCM production environment, the resultant validations during the transfer of payroll invoices to the Integrated Financial Management Systems that were introduced to ensure accuracy and payment information posed some challenges, "leading to the dropping of the entities entire payroll if any of the information is not aligned as expected.

The validations in include, confirmation that all records in the payroll have the correct Financial Coding Block, Financial Coding Clock combination, Supplier number and Supplied Site."

Bitarakwate said, "The Ministry together with the Ministry of Finance, Planning and Economic Development and National Information Technology Authority, "are jointly working to ensure that invoices with valid data are successfully transferred to ISMS. This task is expected to be completed as soon as possible in any case not later than February 28, 2024."

"In the meantime, by close of business on February 27, 2024, the Ministry of Public Service will centrally send the payroll invoices without errors to IFMS for entities that have completed payroll calculations and the invoices are not ready to IFMS to enable salary and pension payment for February 2024."

Bitarakwate directed all the responsible officers to ensure that the payroll records are, “only those that have been scrutinised and passed for payment. Records with errors in Financial Coding Blocks, Financial Coding Clock combination, Supplier number and Supplied Site, will be communicated to the votes for correct and reprocessing."

She said the inconvenience caused to the public officers and pensioners is unintended and highly regretted.