The Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, or OHCSF, yesterday announced plans to delist unverified civil servants from the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) and stop payment of staff salaries not on the scheme from October 28 in an effort to combat corruption and remove ghost workers from the payroll.
IPPIS is a centralised platform that was launched in 2007 with the goal of ensuring efficiency, accountability, and transparency in the payment of salaries and wages to government personnel.
But in recent years, there have been claims of anomalies, such as the existence of fictitious or nonexistent personnel on the system, which has put it under investigation.
The HoS required all government workers to undergo a thorough verification procedure in order to confirm their eligibility for pay in order to allay these worries.
Civil servants were obliged to provide their biometric information and any necessary identity papers as part of the verification process.
Mohammed Ahmed, Director of Communications for the OHCSF, in a statement signed by him, said the Head of the Service bemoaned the fact that many federal personnel had disregarded the verification procedures, even after several warnings and extensions.
The statement read:
“The Federal Government commenced the implementation of the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System, IPPIS, in the year 2007, with a view to attaining transparency, accuracy, safety and reliability in the management of personnel records, while also curtailing avoidable excesses in personnel costs.
“Driven by the government’s quest to curb ghost workers syndrome and block leakages through personnel cost, the implementation of IPPIS commenced with the payroll module rather than the human resource component.
“Blocking of leakages in personnel cost cannot be genuinely achieved without verifying the personnel records of each and every worker. As such, in 2013, the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, OHCSF, being the repository of official records and information on all public servants, was saddled with the responsibility of cleansing the record on the payroll.
“Leveraging on technology, the office opened a verification portal in April 2017 and directed all public servants to carry out online update of their records. The office carried out aggressive sensitization and publicity via the official, conventional and social media.
‘’An initial period of three months was given for compliance, which was extended to one year in May 2018, to enable all officers update their records. This was the first phase.
“Sequel to another wide publicity, accompanied by numerous pre-verification sensitization visits by IPPIS staff to ministries, extra-ministerial departments and agencies, MDAs, nationwide, the second phase of the exercise, the physical verification, commenced in 2018.
“In this regard, 500 staff from the OHCSF were trained and deployed, in well-communicated and coordinated phases, to the 36 states of the federation and the FCT between 2018 and 2019 to enable officers to carry out the physical verification in their states and save them from travelling to Abuja.”
cc: Vanguard Ng
