MINISTER of Finance, Mrs. Kemi Adeosun, has given reasons why some Federal Government agencies such as the Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) and the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) have not paid their staff the November salary, saying they have exhausted their budgetary allocations as a result of over staffing.
Responding to a question on the matter, she told State House corespondents after a meeting of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) on Wednesday, that the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) shut down automatically when the agencies sought to draw more funds from their accounts than was allocated.
However, she said government has asked for virement from the National Assembly to provide funds for the agencies so that they could pay their salaries.
She said: “The issue of agencies that have not received their salaries, let me explain how the salary system works. All the agencies have an allocational IPPIS which is the salary platform. If for example an agency has a salary for the year of N12 billion, what we insist they should do is continue to pay until that N12 billion is exhausted. Now, what happens with the number of agencies is the number of staff I heard was more than the budgetary allocation.
“Instead of taking one billion a month it was taking N1.2 billion or N1.3 billion. So, by the time it got to October, many agencies had exhausted their allocation.
“What we did in the virement we sent to the National Assembly which the National Assembly has approved was to list all agencies that had problems with their salaries and applied to National Assembly.
“We had to go back to the National Assembly to ask for an increase in the budgetary allocation of those agencies.
“We received that virement advice from the National Assembly on Monday this week. We are waiting to log it onto the system so that we can now pay those agencies.
“Basically, the system itself shut them down. That is the way the system has been configured. It’s a problem that used to happen every year and its something we are trying to correct.”
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