Environmental Health Officers Angry Over Salary Deductions

Some 896 Environmental Health Officers are getting agitated over the deduction of GHc 200 each from their monthly salaries for reasons they claim are not known to them. They urged the Principal of the Tamale School of Hygiene who they alleged was responsible for their predicament to prevail upon the Controller and Accountant-General to stop the deductions. They said they had been experiencing these deductions from their salaries since January 2014 without any clear definition and any correspondence as to the actual purpose and reasons behind the deductions. The Environmental Health Officers who expressed these sentiments through their spokesperson Mr. Tahiru Lukman at a news conference in Wa on Monday, said they did not know when these deductions would end and how much they owed as was being alleged. Made up mostly of the 2008/9 year groups of the Tamale School of Hygiene they alleged that efforts to establish the actual reasons behind the deductions from the Controller and Accountant-General and other appropriate authorities were thwarted by the Principal of the School. They said a cumulative amount of GHc 535,800 had so far been deducted from their salaries since January this year. �We emphasise that our case is the act of administrative injustice, violation of the labour law, compromising the banking laws and violation of our human rights�, they stated They gave the Principal of the School 15 working days to ensure that all monies deducted from their salaries are refunded with compensation and a formal apology to them. Mr. Assibe Alfred Dan-ei, Principal of the School in a telephone interview with the GNA said he had no power to instruct the Controller and Accountant �General to make deductions from salaries of past students. According to him in August 2012 it was discovered that some 900 students who had passed out of the school were still collecting allowances which they were not entitled to. He explained that although some of them were employed and were earning monthly salaries they continued collecting the allowances for up to 12 to 14 months. Mr Dan-ei said the Audit Service and EOCO investigated the issue and detected that 896 of them were still collecting the allowance although they had left the school. The Audit Service therefore ordered the money to be retrieved from those who were collecting these unearned allowances hence the deductions by the Controller and Accountant- General