In a significant development, the payroll monitoring exercise is set to expand its reach into public health institutions across the country this year.
The primary objective of this exercise is to scrutinize potential leakages in the public sector wage bill, addressing anomalies in both workload distribution and salary disbursement.
“This year, the focus would be on the health sector. Hopefully, the team will be on the field by the first week in February,” the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC), Benjamin Arthur, told the Daily Graphic in Accra.
Highlighting the ongoing progress of the exercise initiated in April of the previous year, Mr. Arthur noted its concentration on the Local Government Service within the Western, Greater Accra, Central, Volta, and Oti regions.
The other regions will be covered later, he said.
Preliminary investigations
The preliminary analysis of the exercise conducted in 17 institutions last year revealed a notable decrease in their respective wage bills.
Mr Arthur said that the wage bill was reduced by an average of 1.2 per cent from April to August 2023 during the exercise, translating into an equivalent of about GH¢36,108,000.
The Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD) wage bill for 707,000 employees on the single spine had also witnessed a one and a six per cent reduction month over month, respectively, for July and August, resulting in savings of about GH¢178,360.000 and about GH¢ 18,448,000 for the country.
Mr Arthur commended the CAGD for its support which he said had made the exercise a success, and said the initiative to link the Ghana Card to the payroll was also helping to clean the books.
He, however, said that while the wage bill was dropping, the number of employees was going up, adding “This tells us that if we continue the payroll monitoring exercise, we would be able to clean and save the country a lot of money.”
Productivity
Mr Arthur further said that the exercise was also helping to improve productivity.
“It is letting people who were not reporting to work now come to work because they are aware the commission would be coming around to check attendance for purposes of head count,” he explained.
He said the commission had also introduced a programme to link pay to productivity.
In line with that, the CEO said last year, his outfit sensitised staff of 29 institutions, and that this year, “we want to do a minimum of 40 institutions”.
Mr Arthur said it was only when staff were able to understand the performance appraisal system that they would be able to help set targets for institutions and individuals to enable them to measure their performance.
Information from the performance assessment, he said, would expose challenges such as staff not being provided with assignments and not having the right skills or the right budget to execute their job, to enable his outfit to address those challenges and make the public service more productive.
For instance, Mr Arthur said, the country should get to a point where payslips were linked to input of employees to see if they matched their rewards.