Opeyemi Adelere
The Minister of Labour and Employment, Dr. Chris Ngige, has disclosed that the Federal Government lost N800bn to the old system through which university lecturers were being paid their salaries.
Speaking in Anambra on Sunday, the minister said there was no going back on the use of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) in the payment of salaries of university lecturers, adding that the introduction of the IPPIS had brought an end to the various irregularities in the old system. According to him, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) does not have the power to dictate to the Federal Government how its members should be paid.
He said, “What ASUU is saying is laughable. Your employers will dictate how they will pay you. They can decide to pay you with a cheque which you sign in your regional office every month and you take your salary and go. They can decide to do electronic transfer. You bring your account number and they do a transfer electronically to you.
“But for some strange reasons, this has become an issue with the Academic Staff Union of Universities. They claimed they were being migrated from the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System platform into the IPPIS.
“The Federal Government pays their salaries and the Federal Government says ‘we are losing a lot of money paying you from the Government Integrated Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS) platform because the GIFMIS platform only transmits money for your salaries to the university system, bursar’s office and from there they pay you.’
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“There are shortfalls in the taxes deducted and because of this, the various state governments where those universities are domiciled have petitioned the Joint Tax Board to demand for this shortfall to be paid by the Federal Government, which is the principal employer of these university teachers.
“And over time, that has accumulated into about N800bn which the Joint Tax Board has billed the Federal Government as money that has not been paid to those sub-national governments, the state governments.”
Besides, he said the GIFMIS system was fraught with several anomalies, including cases of ghost workers and people receiving more than their due.
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