“Help Us To Clean Public Payroll” – CAGD

The Controller and Accountant General Department (CAGD) has stressed the need for heads of government departments and agencies to support it to reduce fraud and clean the government payroll system.

Mr Kwasi Kwaning-Bosompem, Deputy Controller and Accountant General in-charge of Payroll Management, said it was the collective responsibility of all stakeholders involved to help clean government payroll and bring down public wage bill.

He was speaking at a payroll sensitization and Electronic Salary Payment Voucher (ESPV) training workshop for salary validators from the Ghana Education Service, the Ghana Health Service and the Ministry of Local Government from three districts in the Ashanti Region, in Kumasi.

The beneficiary Districts are the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly, Kwabre East Municipal and the Atwima-Kwanwoma District.

It was to allow the participants to be retrained on the ESPV system, while offering the CAGD an opportunity to collect feedback on the implementation process.

Mr Kwaning-Bosompen said though there had been a lot of progress in cleaning the public payroll, after the introduction of the ESPV, there were still challenges which needed to be urgently addressed to achieve the objectives of the project.

He said clear understanding of the validation process, assigning right management units to validators and efficient training of validators set-up on the ESPV system, were crucial to achieve the set goals of the project.

Mr. Kwaning- Bosompem, pointed out that, a critical objective of the payroll reforms was to have improved payroll systems and the CAGD had been working assiduously to achieve that objective.

He said the ESPV was introduced against the backdrop of concerns regarding the huge wage bill for public servants and the commitment of the government to have a robust payroll system in the country.

It was also aimed at ensuring effective and efficient management of the payroll cost by eliminating unauthorized payments.

Mr Kwaning-Bosompem therefore, encouraged management unit heads setup on the ESPV system to generate codes to all employees in their units for the E-Payslip registration.