In 2006, the federal government conceived the idea of IPPIS to provide a reliable and comprehensive database for the public service

Abisola-Fernandez Abisola

Nigeria society has always criticised the public sector for encouraging wastage of resources in all forms. These include, finance, facilities, utilities, and human resources. This act has resulted in assets/human liability, and also encouraged financial waste in the public sector.

The Independent And Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) is one of the transformation agenda of the federal government of Nigeria. It has an aim to create a centralised database system for Nigerian public service with a single, accurate source of employee information that provides integration with other business applications.

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IPPIS commenced in April 2007 and by year 2010, it had been implemented in around 17 Ministries, Departments and Agencies. But prior to its commencement by the federal government, there were a lot of challenges faced, particularly personnel information and payroll.

Launched by the former Coordinating Minister for the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the system uncovered most of the fraud through the use of biometric data capture machine. Because ghosts workers have no fingerprints, the bubble burst for those behind the inflated staff figures. Forthwith, the fake workers who have regularly survived the pay at sight charade of the ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) stood out like sore thumbs. The level of collusion here is really the issue and until such issues are sorted out, government will continue to lose billions of Naira to unscrupulous officials.

Some of the challenges were that there was no accurate information about the size and nature of the federal government workforce due to an ineffective manual and file based personnel system operated by the public service. The ineffective system gave rise to “ghost workers”, thereby fraudulent financial practices were enormous: salaries and allowances were claimed and collected by nonexistent workers. And figures were also inflated. Records of loans obtained disappeared from files, while some officers colluded with others to get higher salaries than what is due to them.

Personnel records in files such as birth certificates, declaration of age and certificates of indigenship were often substituted to obtain undue advantage. The federal government and the World Bank estimated that the government was losing about N1 billion to “ghost workers” alone.

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In 2006, the federal government conceived the idea of IPPIS to provide a reliable and comprehensive database for the public service, facilitate manpower training, eliminate record and payroll fraud. Facilitate easy documentation, updating and retrieval of personnel records, and speed up convenient staff remuneration payment with minimal waste and leakage IPPIS was launched with the objectives to equally provide a centralised database to aid government manpower planning and decision making, ease automation and storage of personnel records to support monitoring manpower leakages by ensuring staff remuneration is based on correct information.

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The federal public administration reform programmme Nigeria, office of the secretary to the government of the federation, and the federal civil service commission reported that in the first month of implementation of IPPIS, government saved N 418 million.

However, to get registered on the IPPIS platform, there are criteria that must be met. These included; birth certificate or declaration of age, letter of first appointment, last letter of promotion, letter of change of name for married women, filled IPPIS form, and biometrics by IPPIS Office.

It is pertinent to note that, to a great extent, IPPIS has its enormous advantages and benefits. It is no doubt without its challenges. Some of its problems include the non compliance of all MDA’s to join the system, its cumbersomeness in getting errors committed on the system corrected; workers can wait endlessly for errors made on their accounts to be corrected, difficulty in getting information from the IPPIS office; whatever one gets is almost final.

Sometimes there are human errors which could lead to omission in salary payments. Others include under payments or overpayments which could result in nonpayment of salaries to workers till such errors are corrected. And IPPIS is garbage in garbage out system: Public servants who make errors in their data input are sure to get errors on their records and subsequently get affected.

Recently some of these challenges have been addressed as MDA’s are given access to their respective platforms to update records and make corrections as at when due. This has really helped to reduce the long wait in correction of errors and updating of records, especially when workers are promoted.

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No doubt, IPPIS is a good initiative of the federal government, and has also helped to save a lot of scarce resources. Yet there’s still room for improvement. There should be an effective communication system between the MDAs and the IPPIS. This is to allow a seamless operation for the latter and a sound response to complaints. Hitches here and there should be looked into and addressed, to make all federal workers confident that IPPIS is a working system.

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Abisola is an accountant, and writes from Lagos