No salary delays for civil servants after April, says Gov't

By John Masaba

The Ministry of Public Service has assured civil servants in the country that there will be no more delays in salary payments after April.

The commissioner in charge of payroll, Savia Mugwanya, told New Vision that the ministry is on course to complete all pending salary issues, which have dogged the government payroll in the last one year.

The development should come as a relief to teachers, health workers, police and prison warders, who have borne the brunt of the delays. Recently Police was forced to provide food rations to their staff across the country after the ministry failed to release salaries for two months.

Some staff complained of receiving less than what was on their pay slips while others had Pay As You Earn (PAYE) deducted on their salaries more than once in a single month.

“Many of these problems were due to migration from one payment system to another. We are confident that the process will be completed by April after which things will return to normal,” she said.

After April all civil servants in the country will be paid through the Integrated Financial Management System (IFMS), a shift from the Integrated Personal Payment System (IPPS) which is has been used since 2009.

Under the IPPS salaries were supposed to be effected after every 28th of every month, but the Auditor General’s report exposed a number of flaws in the system. In the 2012 audit report, the Auditor General, John Muwanga, said the payroll lacked integrity checks on the payroll master file. As a result this gave unscrupulous officials in the ministry leeway to create multiple ghosts which resulted in the government losing sh3b.

Mugwanya said that the new system will be fool proof because rather than capturing employees’ details using codes it will now identify people by their full names, salary scale, departments and institution where they work.

This, she says, will make it difficult for any ghosts to be introduced or maintained on the payroll.