Congo Town – The Government of Liberia, through the payroll management training has kickoff training to provide insight for personal analysts, human resource personnel, and comptrollers, among others, on payroll management.
Making special statement Thursday, January 14 at the start of the training, Deputy Finance Minister for Budget Tanneh Bruson said the initiative which started two years ago is geared at securing additional fiscal space to enable government implement activities identified in the Pro-poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development.
“We found that the wage bill was enormous and that it crowded out the fiscal space. To understand numbers, we found it necessary to do a nose dive into compensation and related expenditure across government. This was a time-consuming exercise but worthy one,” Madam Bruson asserted.
Before this process, she explained that there exist ‘gross disparity amongst people in similar category, while across government, all entities had assumed the responsibilities to hire civil servants.
This, according to her, placed others in wrong categories, based on their qualifications while others work multiple jobs in the same government. This accordingly created disparity and payroll paddling.
“Many of us created space to accommodate friends, relatives by accommodating them through the allowance framework that existed or as consultants, to the point where even drivers were capture in that category,” Madam Bruson averred.
But with the collapse of salaries and allowances and the introduction of the National Identification Scheme, as well as mandatory registration requirements of all government employees and consultants, government has witnessed positive results within the payroll system, which he said is solving some of these problems.
However, she said there is still more to be done to sustain the gains and to ensure a more comprehensive approach to managing the wage bill.
This, she said must include the recruitment and most likely validity of employees.
“This process may be seen rocky now, but it is in the best interest of the country,” Bruson added.
The training according to Dell Francis Wreh, Head of the Payroll Management Team, is a start of series of trainings that will create an improve financial management system for government entities.
“The training focus on how to process the Payroll and education on several issues concerning the Payroll,” Mr. Wreh said.
It will drive the path of making the payroll effective and techniques in making sure that the payroll is equitable as well as having value for money.
For his part, the Director General of the Civil Service Agencies of Liberia Jimmy Thompson said there has been significant reform surrounding the Payroll system.
However, he said the system has also being faced with some challenges in setting things straight.
“Each time we want to set up things, people will try to bypass us,” Mr. Thompson said.
This according to him is because, people are trying to help friends and others, by placing them into positions that do not reflect on the actual payroll.
He said those who were in leadership before the CDC administration raised a lot of revenue, but was only meant to pay themselves.
However, according to him, the current financial management system that is being put in place will be digitize, so that future government will have a clear record of government employees.
Meanwhile Mr. Thompson said the numbers of government employees have been significantly reduced, since they embarked on cleaning of the Payroll.
He said the training brought together over 200 employees in the financial, and human resource sectors at various government entities.