Teachers who are expecting the payment of their salary arrears and allowances may be disappointed.
This is because an ongoing validation process of their documents to facilitate payments has been suspended.
Following claims that a number of the teachers in the country employed by the Ghana Education Service presented fake certificates, The Audit Department and the Controller and Accountant General’s Department, were validating the documents before payments are made.
[contextly_sidebar id=”uEi56mJa6mWEaAhrOU0dP9zEOpm2ytmK”]But in an interview with Citi News, the Head of Compensation at the Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT), Ahinakwa Quarshie, said the break will also allow the Audit Department to issue a report on all anomalies that have resulted in the validation exercise.
He said phase one of the validation exercise ended on March 14, 2016.
Mr. Quarshie explained that the break “will enable the teachers and the Ghana Education Service coordinators to liaise together to get the needed data that will support the teachers’ claims for the payment of arrears to be made available to the audit service.”
“At the time that we were breaking, close to 11, 000 had been validated and only 4,000 had been earmarked for payment. The remaining had issues so we broke with the view that the list will be posted to the regional and district offices of the Ghana Education Service so the teachers will go and see if there is any issue they have and rectify such issues so that they forward them to the regional or district offices for onward submission to the audit centre,”
The GNAT head of compensation added that the move will allow the “audit service to be in the position to audit all documents.”
Payment of teacher allowances likely to delay
Mr. Ahenakwa Quarshie had earlier told Citi News that it will be impossible for the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) to meet the April 15 deadline considering the workload.
“In principle, we have agreed to that [deadline] but the volume of work is also such that the personnel who are working on them are finding it difficult to complete it on time.” He explained that from February 25, 2015 till last week, “out of the 29,000 documents, they have validated just 11,000 and they are claiming that we have close to 50,000 forms. So I doubt whether the period that they were given, they will be in a position to complete the work.”
“However, I will not sound pessimistic so we will all keep our fingers crossed and see what happens. They are looking for some issues and each form has four to five attachments and they need to go through all of them in order to satisfy themselves that indeed this is a genuine form or not. That actually makes the process very slow,” Ahenakwa Quarshie added.
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By: Godwin A. Allotey/citifmonline.com/Ghana