Financial Secretary Simon Wilson.
By JADE RUSSELL
Tribune Staff Reporter
jrussell@tribunemedia.net
PAYROLL errors could be costing the government as much as $120m a year, Financial Secretary Simon Wilson said yesterday.
He said some employees received a salary for decades even though the government could not account for them or their work. It is the kind of irregularity he hopes to solve with a new digital system.
The Ministry of Finance hosted a training workshop at the National Training Agency yesterday to introduce finance officers to the Oracle ERP Fusion system.
“Our payroll accounts for 60 per cent of the government’s budget,” Mr Wilson told reporters after the event’s opening ceremony. “And if we have an error rate of 10 per cent, that’s roughly $120m. Those small errors, overpayments or underpayments and so forth, if you minimise those errors, you can have tremendous savings from the government.”
Mr Wilson said all employees would be captured in the new system, preventing cases of people getting a salary under dubious circumstances.
“Everyone knows of the employees who get lost in the system,” he said. “In the Family Islands, they work for local government, they work for the school board, but they are hired irregularly, i.e., they’re not in the pay sheet, they’re paid by some other mechanism or some other means.
“Every employee is going to be captured in this system. That is for us critical cuz we assume, sometimes wrongly, that we know of every employee, that we know the details of every employee. But every year, we find instances where we do not know an employee existed or was being paid or has been paid by the government or the ministry.
“I know from my own experience in the Ministry of Finance we had employees in Andros who we paid for 40 years, every month, employees of the Ministry of Finance. We don’t know what he did, never did an ACR of those employees, but they were paid every month, and they retired.
“And what they did when they retired? They took a flight and come up to the Ministry of Finance and said I retired, where is my gratuity? And we had no answer. We checked their records and, yes, surely enough we paid them from 1974 up until 2014, every month, but we had no record.
“And we have too much instances like that and persons go undetected and then we have to go through this long, arduous process of trying to regularise them.”
Mr Wilson said the last time the ministry tried to modernise the accounting and financial management system, success was limited because of insufficient support from workers.
“We cannot succeed unless there is buy-in from finance and accounts officers,” he said. “We’ve done this before, with JD Edwards, which we purchased at great cost and great fanfare and because there was not enough buy-in, what we were left with was simply a payroll system.”
“We can’t afford a repeat of that.”
Mr Wilson said the next few months will be intense as staff learn the system before it is launched early next year.
He said salary reassessments and pension payments are among the government services requiring too much manual work.
“All these things take time, and to compensate for time, we hire a lot of people,” he said. “We have large accounts departments, and even with extra manpower, we’re still short-staffed because even with extra manpower, we need trained officers.”
Comments
stillwaters 9 months, 1 week ago
Mister.....stop trying ing this distraction. Go fix this, it's your job.....stop whining. What we want to be sorted out immediately is Pintard, Cornish, Bell, Cooper.....and the doggone shanty towns. Send those illegal Chinese workers home too.....talking nonsense about how nobody knows how those Chinese got here.
stillwaters 9 months, 1 week ago
Correction....not Pintard....Gibson
moncurcool 9 months, 1 week ago
So true.
Just stupid how this dude whining about what he should simply fix. Trying to tell me they so backward that they don't have a system of the people they paying?
Sickened 9 months, 1 week ago
There has been a lot of 'accidentally on purpose' payments over the last 50 years. That is how corruption works. Clamp down on this to your peril.
sheeprunner12 9 months, 1 week ago
Simon Wilson just got a big payout from the Treasury.
And the people don't know how much of our Treasury money that he pocketed.
But he is comfortable picking on the small FI grunt workers who can't defend themselves.
Sick bastard.
BONEFISH 9 months, 1 week ago
@Sheeprunner12. This problem with the payroll system was being dealt with by John Rolle. The reason previous attempts fail was resistance and lack of buy-in by certain civil servants. Since every thing in your simple mind PLP and FNM, John is married to the late Chuck Virgill's niece. This is really an attempt to stave off this country heading to bankruptcy and modernize the payroll system. If Hubert Ingraham remained as prime minister,he would support this program.
hrysippus 9 months, 1 week ago
And we march on with hands outstretched to get that free gubmint money towards a nearer clearer failed state. This is not the new way, it has been going on for near on 50 years now. Dollar devaluation soon come, then you cry.
BONEFISH 9 months, 1 week ago
The problems with the government payroll has been ongoing for fifty years. John Rolle, when he was acting as financial secretary attempted to deal with this.
SP 9 months, 1 week ago
The lack of efficiency and waste in the government is absolutely mind-boggling!
I know an individual who worked for the government that went to clock in at work every day and went back home for years. This person was paid every month but hadn't hit a lick for decades and is now collecting retirement benefits!
Corruption is rampant, people caught "stealing" face no accountability.
Our leaders should be held 100% responsible for how the people's taxes are mismanaged just like any company management.
Sickened 9 months, 1 week ago
Whoever stops this handing out of money will lose the next election. Even though the current gov't knows they will lose the next election they still will not do what is right. The exact same thing happened under the previous gov't. They knew the things that had to be corrected but they didn't do them even though everyone told them they would be gone in the election. Too many civil servants, taxi and bus drivers and businesses large and small depend on this 'free' money.
FreeportFreddy 9 months, 1 week ago
They should start tracking down the people that TIEFED and charge them to recover the money. It's not that complicated.
bcitizen 9 months, 1 week ago
Yet the government wants to treat honest taxpayers like criminals, killing us with regulations and red tap to drain every penny they can get out of our pockets and you have this going on.
IslandWarrior 9 months, 1 week ago
20 years too late ...
SP 9 months, 1 week ago
CORRECTION......50 years too late!
hj 9 months, 1 week ago
Instead of tracking down the money that goes missing through errors you have no problem threatening small and medium size businesses with more red tape, higher fees and withholding their business licences.
themessenger 9 months, 1 week ago
So, how is it that old age pensioners have to verify they ain't dead every six months or have their pension cut off but ya'll paying people you have no record of for twenty years?
Sounds like yinna been paying into a couple of select "employee" bank account for all this time.
sheeprunner12 9 months, 1 week ago
Every person who works for the Government has a supervisor ....... Who holds the supervisors responsible???
This is another PLP cop out by Simon Wilson.
No sensible person should accept this BS.
themessenger 9 months, 1 week ago
Ineptocracy
Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc'-ra-cy) - a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.
bahamianson 9 months, 1 week ago
So how do we retrieve the money? Oh, let us increase VAT. Let the stupid people pay for it while we celebrate 50 years of independence with fancy parties and Balls.
realfreethinker 9 months, 1 week ago
Brave need to have his balls squeezed
trueBahamian 9 months, 1 week ago
What kind of bs is this? How does this abuse go undetected or better yet unaddressed for years. Simple checks and balances. Why is there always a story why money walked out the door? Everybody involved from the PM all the way down the line needs to be fired. Anyone who received payment that they clearly knew they shouldn't have should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
We're running deficit after deficit every year because of a huge civil service payroll. Now we hear this bs about error. Error my backside! This was designed to.work exactly how it's working. You noticed Simon Wilson didn't say anything about determining the exact amount of the supposed decades long errors or about recovering the funds. This is GROSS, FLAGRANT ABUSE. Every citizen or resident who pays taxes need to demand the dismissal of everybody. Every PM before the current one needs to give an account for this and the current one as well. As you see Simom said they were aware of these issues for years. Unbelievable!
In addition to firing, some folks need to be flogged for this.
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