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Government has hinted it will penalize teachers found to have back-dated their documents submitted for the payment of salary arrears. This is according to the Employment and Labour Relations Minister, Haruna Iddrisu.

An on-going validation process by the Auditor General’s Department and the Controller and Account General’s Department has revealed that some teachers back-dated their documents submitted for the processing of salary arrears and allowances. 

About 6,000 documents belonging to the teachers have also been rejected because they were found to be duplicates. More than 400 teachers have so far been identified by the Ghana Education Service (GES) to be teaching with fake certificates.

Speaking to Citi News, Haruna Iddrisu said punishing the teachers will deter others from doing same. “We have some revelation of irregularities and fraud bothering on certificates backdating of some of the details. Backdating in particular of date of appointment and year of appointment and all that, has a consequence in computing the compensation of a particular employee.

Those determined to have forged certificates and committed other irregularities will face the full rigorous of the law apart from the fact that they will be denied their compensation and their claims,” he added.

He also revealed that Government in the coming months, will task a private audit firm to validate documents of teachers nationwide to avert fraud in the payment of salary arrears. The Employment Minister said, “it’s the view of the president that the payroll should be outsourced to a private sector entity to allow for more efficiency and speed.” 

“I’m now convinced that given the volume of work, we may have to look for other partners along the line maybe for GES and in particular the kind of software that they would use in order that you don’t have to allow for this perennial occurrence whether its teachers, doctors or nurses. Every other time that they finish school you have a difficulty roping them unto the payroll and graduating from the payment of allowances to paid salaries and wages.

I don’t think that it is an acceptable way to process compensation. We should bring a terminal end to the perennial and annual ritual of having to wait for a threat of strike before you act and we need to act more proactively.”

Three teacher Unions; Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT) and the Coalition of Concerned Teachers (CCT) had threatened a strike by close of Monday February 29 if their allowances and salary arrears are not paid. In a move to avert the strike, government last week, paid over GHc 1.5 million as part payment of the GHc16 million owed them. Meanwhile, the teacher unions will meet today [Tuesday], to discuss the way forward.