Accra, Dec 9, GNA - Employment and Social Welfare Minister, Mr Enoch=

Teye Mensah has blamed the slow pace of mapping and migration of various organisations on the single spine salary structure on the reluctance of s= ome institutions to submit data for their migration. This, he said, is because some of these institutions did not have evidence of approval for some of their current allowances from the Minist= ry of Finance and Economic Planning.

Besides unauthorised use of internally generated fund by some institutions to pay allowance not approved by the Finance Ministry is another major reason since there are fears that the disclosure of these unapproved allowances would lead to their withdrawal by the Commission. "This situation has created the impression that the Commission and fo= r that matter government, is delaying the implementation because of budgeta= ry constraints. This is absolutely not true", the Minister told journalists at the Meet the Press session on Thursday. Mr Mensah said while over 100 human resource and accounting focal persons in 95 institutions had been trained to undertake the mapping of their employees, only 28 had completed their mapping. He said the Commission had noted that some institutions had genuine challenges and was working with them to resolve the issues to permit migration onto the new salary structure.

Mr Mensah said government had no intention to postpone the implementation to 2011, saying five more institutions would receive salar= ies based on the new structure this month to bring total number of institutio= ns to 19.

Mr Mensah said the Commission was currently facilitating discussions on the consultants report on the standardisation and harmonisation of categories 2 and 3 allowances within the nine service classifications.