‘Heads of MDAs must help clean payroll’

The Director in-charge of Payroll at the Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD), Mrs Elizabeth Osei, has charged heads of ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) that it is their responsibility to delete the names of persons who have vacated their posts, deceased and retirees to ensure a clean payroll devoid of “ghost names”.

According to her, the “ghost names syndrome” on public sector payroll, which had become a major headache to the CAGD, was impeding the country’s development and warned that sanctions would be meted out to heads of MDAs who were engaged in such malpractices.

She was speaking on the sidelines of a payroll sensitisation workshop and Electronic Salary Payment Voucher (ESPV) re-training exercise for heads of MDAs in Sunyani.

Workshop

The workshop was aimed at sharpening the skills of all stakeholders involved in the management of the payroll value chain to enhance their knowledge of dealing with payroll issues.

The head of MDAs were also taken through the process of removing ghost names and eliminate unauthorised payment, among others.

As part of the CAGD’s eight-day exercise in the region, the officials are expected to visit other municipalities and districts to sensitise the heads of MDAs to help in addressing challenges associated with their workers.

The department is targeting heads of departments, human resource managers, circuit supervisors and heads of accounts of MDAs, among others.

Intervention

Mrs Osei said the CAGD had adopted several interventions including the implementation of policies and programmes to help delete all ghost names and prevent such names from being included on the public sector payroll.

She said the CAGD had no hand in ghost names found in the government payroll, explaining that putting names into the payroll was not done by the department but heads and managers of MDAs.

Mrs Osei admonished heads of MDAs to update their payroll platforms with names of new entrants and deletion of deceased and dismissed staff.

Robust payroll

The Deputy Controller and Accountant General in-charge of Payroll, Mr Kwasi Kwaning-Bosompem, said the ESPV was introduced to address concerns regarding the high wage bill of public sector and to help the government’s commitment to have a robust payroll system to ensure efficient management of the payroll cost.

He explained that the introduction of the ESPV had helped in addressing some of the challenges associated with payroll system and mentioned lack of understanding of the validation process and wrong management units assigned as validators as some of the challenges impeding the total achievement of the ESPV.

Mr Kwaning-Bosompem urged heads of departments to take ownership of their payroll systems and take steps to validate their workers payroll each month by letting the slogan “No validation No Pay” to be their watch word.

Training

“The CAGD had taken steps to sensitise and retrain validators across the regions”, he stated, adding that selected CAGD regional and district staff had been trained to handle validation challenges at the local level.