Liberia: CSA Starts Training on ATAPS, Plans to Robustly Manage Harmonized GOL Payroll

MONROVIA — After successfully implementing the Government of Liberia pay reform process, widely known as payroll harmonization, the Civil Service Agency (CSA) has started the process of transitioning from the joint payroll management team (consisting of the CSA and the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning) to the payroll team of the Civil Service Agency comprising of Employment Services Department and the Pay, Benefits, and Pension Department.

The training which is taking place at the executive conference room of the CSA at the Ministerial Complex, will prepare about 25 payroll analysts to vigorously manage the Alternative Temporary Automated Payroll System (ATAPS) and the upcoming modified version known as Civil Service Module

Making remarks Tuesday at the commencement of the week-long training session, CSA Director-General James Thompson acknowledged the level of work that has been done to standardize GOL centralized payroll across all 103 government ministries and agencies.

He said the government was faced with a major challenge of spending nearly all of its limited revenue just on compensation alone despite the huge competing demands it had to tackle.

Said Mr. Thompson: “The government’s entire budget rests around five hundred and something million but I can assure you that the demands on that budget [are] almost [equivalent] to two billion dollars.”

He continued: “But the most difficult challenge we faced was, we already crying for more but almost all of what we got was going towards compensation. I always like to show people how we are still being killed by this compensation challenge we faced. So compensation moved from around thirty million in 2006 to three hundred and twenty-seven million in 2018”

For his part, the Executive Director of the Liberia Macroeconomic Policy Analysis Center (LIMPAC) Del-Francis Wreh described the transition as historic and extremely significant.

“Today marks the beginning of full transitioning of all payroll-related activities to the Civil Service Agency as required by law,” he said.

He continued: “Part of our historical understanding of the process is the fact that we went through a huge payroll reform. We had two payroll systems – one that was managed by the CSA under the Civil Service Module and then the general allowance managed by the head of entities. You all know what happened with those two processes. The fact that general allowance was purely discretionary, it inflated the wage bill, it created disparity [and] created all kinds of inequality on the payroll.”

The Alternative Temporary Automated Payroll System (ATAPS) is currently processing payroll for the Government of Liberia. This system was put in place because the previous system (Civil Service Module) did not meet the requirements for multi-currency functionality adopted under the new harmonization scheme.

Currently, the transition is on the way to migrate data from ATAPS to the CSM platform deployed at the CSA.

The training which is taking place at the executive conference room of the CSA at the Ministerial Complex about 25 payroll analysts will be trained to vigorously manage the new payroll system to ensure its efficiency and effectiveness.