Uche Usim, Abuja
Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF), Mr Idris Ahmed has asked worried university lecturers to relax as the dreaded Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) has been designed to accommodate and efficiently address all genuine concerns and peculiarities in the Nigerian higher education system.
This is as 94,990 staff of federal universities, comprising 8, 146 academic and 86, 844 non-academic have been successfully enrolled into IPPIS.
The figure represents more than 70% of the staff of federal universities.
The AGF, while responding to concerns raised by the Vice Chancellors based on the recent enrolment of university staff into IPPIS, said; ‘all rules and peculiarities in the universities that are recognized by the government will be accommodated and implemented through IPPIS.
“All the peculiarities should be stated, all the rules of engagement should equally be stated; we are ready to go by the rules of engagement. All the rules that are recognized by the government in the universities, we will go by these rules, none will be set aside’, he said.
Idris said the objection by the academic staff of the universities to the IPPIS was totally unfounded, as the Federal Government has, during many meetings with the universities, assured them that IPPIS was not created to take away the autonomy of the universities, but to make the management of personnel more efficient.
He noted that the practice where universities recruited staff not minding whether their budget would accommodate such employment was responsible for the issue of shortfall in personnel revenue.
He explained that IPPIS would help the universities solve the problem of shortfall in personnel revenue as the recruitment and remuneration of staff would be more efficient.
Idris commended the vice chancellors for the initiative to reach out to the Office of the Accountant General of the Federation on the contentious issue of enrollment of university staff on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS). He solicited the cooperation of the Vice-Chancellors with the government, ‘as the implementation of the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) and other financial reform initiatives aimed at entrenching probity and transparency in the system have come to stay’.
Earlier, the Chairman of the Committee of Vice Chancellors and Vice Chancellor of Bayero University, Kano, Prof Muhammad Bello, had brought up certain issues observed during the just concluded enrollment of university staff into the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) and requested the Accountant General of the Federation to help resolve them.