The Fair Wages and Salaries Commis­sion (FWSC) has commenced a nationwide payroll monitoring exercise as part of measures to clean up government payroll and ensure equity.

The exercise which is kick-start­ing with the Internal Audit Agency (IAA) will among other things seek to uncover salary irregularities, ghost names on the payroll and undeserving allowances among others.

Addressing the media in Accra, the Chief Executive Of­ficer (CEO) of the FWSC, Ing. Benjamin Arthur said as part of their mandate, they did not only determine wages but also had a response to monitor the payroll of government.

He said even though monitoring and evaluation formed part of the commission’s daily activities, it had become necessary to step the process up to ascertain whether it was doing well or not.

Mr Arthur said the monitoring exercise was to offer the com­mission the opportunity to clean up the payroll data to ensure that workers as well as government which is the employer, were not shortchanged.

He said the commission served notice to commence with this na­tional monitoring exercise in April and the Internal Audit Agency (IAA) was the first field operation stop.

We believe that having signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the IAA last year to collaborate in conducting the mon­itoring, we thought that our house should be clean so we have asked them to do their own internal monitoring and share the report with us,” he said.

He said the exercise was not a joke but a very serious one as such persons who knew that they were not deserving of their emoluments must refund, stressing that “In our operations if we come across those who are not benefiting from certain allowances and they have been misplaced as far as grade is concerned we will have to take steps to correct same. If we find out that people fraudulent­ly are receiving salaries, we will definitely contact or liaise with appropriate authorities to take the necessary actions.”

Mr Arthur said the overarching objective of the whole exercise was to ensure that people earn what was deserving of them and also ensure equity.

On his part, the Director-Gen­eral of the (IAA), Dr Eric Oduro Osae, said the monitoring exercise would help promote accountability and transparency in the payment of salaries to public sector workers.

He said the payroll as a compo­nent of government budget was getting higher and higher as such there was the need to clean it up.

Dr Osae said there was no better way of cleaning it than through a monitoring by the FWSC.

He said there were issues of missing names, issues of unknown names, issues of people using other people’s names and vehicles for car maintenance allowances and people with different dates of births.

He said persons who were taking government monies illegally would be sanctioned according to law.

Dr Osae noted that internal auditors were leading the charge in either eliminating or reducing payroll fraud in the country.

“Again internal auditors are working with the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission (FWSC) and even as the FWSC monitor the payment of salaries, internal auditors will also do the payroll auditing bit to ensure that per­sistently we reduce payroll fraud and government’s compensation budget which is ballooning on the account of some of these irregu­larities,” he said.

He explained that there had been instances of differences in retirement age and they had been flagged off because of the use of the Ghana Card.