A communication team member of New Patriotic party (NPP) , Mr Kwasi Poku, has urged the Finance Ministry to be firm in it decision concerning the mechanised payroll system.
He said if the ministry suspend its decision, another group would come out with an excuse to be given an additional time to get its members on board.
Admitting that the mechanised payroll system was long overdue, he said “this project started two years ago, are they saying that within a period of two years, NAGRAT couldn’t get their teachers onboard?”.
Mr Poku was speaking in an interview with HomebaseTv’s Kofi Doe Lawson in Accra today.
He said when this exercise was done well, it would cover up “ghost names” ,saying, ” we need to be serious in this country. Nothing should prevent teachers from getting this thing done”.
“Government needs to take the bull by the horn. When this thing is done early, money for ghost names could even be used to facilitate the free SHS agenda” he added.
Read his press statement below:
Press Release
A statement by the Ministry of Finance last week said the Minister of Finance, Mr Ken Ofori-Atta, had on February 10, 2017, requested the CAGD to inform all public servants about the government mechanised payroll system for those who had not registered on the new SSNIT biometric system to do so by the end of February 2017.
“This directive will come into effect on the April 2017 payroll. Consequently, those not registered with the SSNIT, as directed shall be treated as “ghosts” going forward and shall as such be removed from the payroll for April 2017.”
“These two directives, resulting in the identification of close to 50,000 ‘ghost’ names on the payroll and Pensions Registry, are expected to save the country some GH¢35 million in payroll cost on a monthly basis or a total of over GH¢250 million in 2017 alone,” it pointed out.
Nagrat
But the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) warns of massive labour unrest if the Ministry of Finance goes ahead to instruct the CAGD to delete the names of about 13,000 of its members from the payroll starting this month.
The association, therefore, appealed to the ministry to suspend its intended action and to extend its deadline from April to May 2017 to enable it to get its members in the hinterlands, whose names were not in the SSNIT biometric register, to do so.
