The Public Accounts Committee of Parliament has asked for a forensic investigation into how the government lost billions of shillings due to a faulty electronic payroll system.
This was after the committee chaired by Soroti Woman MP Angeline Osegge discovered several anomalies in the installation of the Integrated Personnel and Payment System (IPPS) during their interaction with the ministry of Public Service officials led by the Permanent Secretary, Ms. Catherine Birakwate Musingwire, on Thursday.
The lawmakers were following up concerns on the use of IPPS raised by the Auditor General in two financial years, 2015/16 and 2016/17.
The Auditor General, Mr. John Muwanga, noted in the earlier report (2016) that whereas the government in 2009 contracted two firms for the supply, installation, design, and implementation and commissioning of the IPPS system at USD 4.4 Million (about shs16.6bn), the system has remained faulty and this puts taxpayers’ money at risk.
“Let us recommend for a forensic audit, I would want to know who was responsible for the procurement and who did what in the whole process, if they are walking on the face of the earth they must answer,” said Osegge.
The Auditor General’s report for the year ended December 2016 indicated that “a review of employee records within the IPPS revealed major errors in the data being maintained on the system; errors existed in the category of service, age and years of employment.”
It was also established that out of 130,331 traditional civil servants on the electronic payroll system, a total of 28,562 were indicated as still on probation.
There were employees on the system who were reflected to have worked for 96 years, while others were aged 120 years old but still in active service.
“The above indicates that the data is inaccurate and may not be fit for migration into the proposed new system,” stated the auditor general.
The report added that, “on top of having inaccurate data, the system controls are also weak, as such, employees would be deleted off the payroll and only reinstated upon submitting their true age.”
The Auditor General advised the permanent secretary to expedite the process of validation to ensure that clean data is available at the time of migration.
The auditor general also raised cases where duplication had occurred and that the ministry processed 284 death gratuity files through the Integrated Personnel and Payroll System and forwarded them to the respective votes for subsequent payment.
Accordingly, “payrolls worth Shs 4.9bn were sent out to 82 votes for payment of death gratuity [but] due to a system weakness, the files were duplicated,” reads part of the report for the year ended 2016.
Mr. Muwanga further noted that “as a result, some votes paid the beneficiaries twice, leading to a financial loss at that level.”
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At the time of writing the report (December 2016), Mr. Muwanga said, the status of the overpayment was that Shs 87.2 million had been recovered from four beneficiaries yet shs 1.03 million meant for 61 beneficiaries was yet to be paid.
Another Shs446.9 million had been paid to tell beneficiaries and had not been recovered yet Shs 3.5 bn for 202 beneficiaries remained unknown.
Ms. Birakwate presented a letter explaining her repeated calls on accounting officers to expedite the recovery of the money which had been paid in duplicate.
She blamed the anomaly on the faulty system which she inherited two years ago, and that they had already discussed the need for a forensic audit
The auditor general also raised a red flag on an increase in domestic arrears over the period of three years from Shs 996 million in 2014/15 to Shs 2.04bn in 2015/16 and 2.4bn in 2016/17.
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