In a bid to curb corruption and eliminate ghost workers from the payroll, the Office of the Head of the Civil Service of the Federation, OHCSF, yesterday announced plans to delist unverified civil servants from the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS, and stop payment of their salaries after October 27.
IPPIS, introduced in 2007, is a centralized platform designed to ensure transparency, accountability, and efficiency in the payment of salaries and wages for civil servants.
However, it has come under scrutiny in recent years due to reports of irregularities, including the presence of fake or non-existent employees on the system.
To address these concerns, the HoS mandated a comprehensive verification process for all government employees to authenticate their eligibility to receive salaries.
As part of the verification, civil servants were required to provide their biometric data along with relevant identification documents.
But, in a statement signed by Director, Communications, OHCSF, Mohammed Ahmed, in Abuja, the HoS lamented that a significant number of civil servants had failed to comply with the verification requirements, despite repeated reminders 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.
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"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 carry out the physical verification in their states and save them from traveling to Abuja."
