Payroll system

SINCE taking over Government, one of the first things Prime Minister Marape did was to visit key government agencies to talk to departmental heads and their staff about what he expected from them.
For instance, he visited the Department of Agriculture and Livestock (DAL) to talk about the need to create more opportunities in the agriculture sector.
In short, he was telling the secretary and his senior management team – bring me projects I can approve to give the economy a major boost to generate income and create jobs for our people.
The prime minister has made agriculture his number one priority by appointing three vice-ministers to identify the projects, fast track and more importantly implement them.
Two of the projects that are ready to go are the vanilla project in East and West Sepik spearheaded by Governor Allan Bird and backed by the European Union and the Central rice project approved by the former government for which a project agreement has already been signed with the investor.
We all know that the agriculture sector has been neglected for years but for the secretary and his team, there is now a golden opportunity to put agriculture back on top of the agenda as the key driver of economic growth for the nation.
The challenge and the question is, will they deliver on what the prime minister is asking for.
The prime minister also visited the Department of Personnel Management (DPM) because he is concerned that the public sector makes up a small section of the population but chews up the biggest portion of the national budget.
If the prime minister and the new government want to make an impact in the next two and half years, they should drastically improve the performance of the public sector.
It’s no use telling public servants to perform when we continue to allow them to roll up to work after 10am on work days and then find some excuse to pick up their children at school at 3pm.
DPM has no excuse because some years ago they trialed a number of bio-metric systems using facial recognition, thumb and palm print techniques to measure attendance of public servants at the workplace.
The results were amazing – the government can save hundreds of millions of kina by removing hundreds of ghost names that continue to appear on the payroll while at the same time get public servants to turn up at work on time for a full day’s work thereby improving productivity.
DPM knows these improvements can be made but for some reason they keep going back to the Concept payroll system for so called “data cleansing” which continues to produce inflated figures year after year.
It’s no secret that operators of the Concept payroll system are paid by the number of salaries they process on the payroll so it is not in their interest to reduce those figures even if they are ghost names,
It’s also no secret that a large number of private companies and State owned enterprises (SOE) successfully use bio-metric systems to ensure their employees turn up for a fair days work for a fair days pay.
There is absolutely no reason why the same systems cannot be used successfully in government departments. Over to you Public Service Minister.

Former Waigani Servant,
NCD