The Federal Government in October 2006, under the Treasury Single Account (TSA) conceived the idea of Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS). It was aimed to provide a reliable and comprehensive database for the public service.
The concept was also meant to address the long battle against ghost workers and to facilitate human resource planning. It was also conceived to eliminate manual record and payroll fraud.
Similarly, the Treasury Single Account was primarily designed to bring all Government funds in bank accounts within the effective control and operational purview of the Treasury in order to enthrone centralized, transparent and accountable revenue management. It’s to facilitate effective cash management and ensure cash availability, etc.
The IPPIS Secretariat is a department under the Office of the Accountant-General of the Federation and is responsible for payment of salaries and wages directly to government employee’s bank account with appropriate deductions and remittances of third party payments, such as Federal Inland Revenue Service and State Boards of Internal Revenue.
The IPPIS was established in 2006 by the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo.
The body at the starting point, was able to detect nearly 2,000 ghost workers in the Nigeria’s civil service system, with the resultant saving of millions of naira. And that exactly was one of the primary purposes of its establishment.
Strangely, universities and other tertiary Institutions fought tooth and nail to be excluded, and they eventually succeeded in being excluded from the operations of the IPPIS for reasons they gave.
Yes, the IPPIS is a very good concept and has done quite a lot of good things against the background of the purpose of its establishment, but the usual Nigerian factor has since began to show clearly in its implementation or operations, especially in the nation’s Federal Capital Territory Administration.
The managers of the body, from bottom to the top ranks, have been caught abusing the concept and the privilege attached to the IPPIS. The operatives, mainly those at the echelon, have turned IPPIS into the business-as-usual thing, which, in a simple word means corruption.
Lately, the operatives have come under some legal entanglements over some questionable matters, including but not limited to the issue of divulging workers’ pay particulars, such as payslips, staff numbers, files, employment security numbers and others to criminals on mission to defraud such workers.
Aggrieved workers have cried themselves to chocking point over situations where the managers of the IPPIS would, and have been, deducting their salaries or even transferring their pay packets to some scammers or fraudulent individuals and questionable corporate entities in the name of questionable loans taken by such workers, without their permission for such deduction.
In other words, the IPPIS managers have unilateral, without the permission of, or consultation with the affected workers, deducted big chunk of their pay packets for the purpose of settling purported loans which the workers took outside the IPPIS purview.
There are other cases where the IPPIS deduct workers salaries for purpose that are not explainable, leaving such workers to think that the system (IPPIS) has been infested by those who hide under it to enrich themselves while impoverishing the workers, under flimsy, questionable excuses.
In other words, one wonders as to what is the business of the IPPIS managers in deducting or transferring about 98 percent of the salaries of innocent workers to notorious scammers who claimed that the workers took loans through them without the IPPIS finding out how such loans were given or taken. The haste in, and confidence with which the IPPIS managers carry out the biddings of the notorious scammers to the discomfort of the workers, apart from violating the civil service rules, clearly indicates complicity and full participation of the IPPIS managers in the scams.
One is aware that at certain time since Chief Nyeson Wike came in as minister of the Federal Capital Territory, he romanced with the idea of scrapping the IPPIS. One is also aware that the minister recently received a petition from no fewer than 50 different categories of workers in the capital territory’s administration about the fraudulent operations of the IPPIS and that the minister was forced to give strict instruction that the managers should stop such deductions.
As is usual with the Nigeria’s system, the stubborn operatives stopped the fraudulent deductions as directed by the minister just for two months, and then resumed their action when they felt the minister was no longer looking at them.
This is the reason why it has become imperative to call on the minister, who means well for the workers, to scrap this body and device a more transparent method of not just maintaining the integrity of the payment system in the service but also protecting the workers from the vultures in the system, who are just looking for their external collaborators, with unbelievable excuses, to deny the hardworking personnel their hard-earned monthly payments.
Dr. Dantani Musa wrote in from Asokoro, Abuja.