IMANI has made some stunning revelations as regards payroll discrepancies in the Controller and Accountant General?s Department, where public sector workers who are on ?leave without pay? are still getting paid by the Department.
According to the IMANI Boss, Franklin Cudjoe some workers on the public sector payroll also get paid double salaries when moving from their old salary structure to a new one.
On his Facebook wall on Monday morning Franklin Cudjoe revealed that there are instances of salaries being processed for employees on leave without pay, study leave without pay and unauthorized leave.
According to the posted revelation, IMANI Boss said, he had intercepted copy of an audit on Ghana?s public sector payroll which indicates that, the IPPD2 processes salaries for employees on unpaid leave, Double payment of salaries when employees move from old salary to new salary structure, Payment of Income Tax can be avoided in IPPD2, Payment of salaries to potential ?Ghost Employees,? and Duplicate/Invalid Bank Accounts in IPPD2.
The Auditors have in that document as stated by IMANI Boss, said, there are instances of salaries being processed for employees on leave without pay, study leave without pay and unauthorized leave, and recommended that the system be configured to exclude employees on unpaid leave before processing of payments.
?Processing of unearned salaries for employees on unpaid leave in the system should be stopped with immediate effect in order to avoid further financial loss to the State. In addition, adequate recovery measures should be in place to ensure unearned salaries are retrieved accordingly.?
The auditors also established that the IPPD2 processes double payments when employees move from old salary structure to the new one. The new salary element gets attached to the employee while the old salary does not get terminated in the IPPD2.
This, according to the document, is due to the existing manual process of terminating old salary structure and assigning the new structure to employees.
?There are 3,288 potential duplicate employees that have been identified in IPPD2 having identical first name, last name, national identifier, date of birth and joining date. This could potentially cause a major loss of revenue to GoG. As a matter of urgency, duplicate checks on employee first name, last name, date of birth and other key parameters if applicable should be introduced into IPPD2. Data entered during hire should be validated and rejected/notified in case of potential duplicates,? the document stated.
Also, the validation of account numbers during input is very critical to mitigating the risk of fraud in payroll processing, therefore, auditors recommend that adequate recovery measures should be in place to ensure unearned salaries are retrieved accordingly.
Source: www.spyghana.com
