The Ghana National Association of Teachers (GNAT) has accused some officials of the Controller and Accountant General’s Department for allegedly selling e-payslips meant for free for teachers thus denying many tutors of the code.

“People who have been given the e-payslip code to be given to teachers free of charge are selling them to the teachers and as a result many teachers have not had access to the code thus defeating the purpose of the exercise,” said Mr Thomas Baafi, GNAT Deputy General Secretary.

Mr Baafi levelled the accusation against the Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD) at the closing session of GNAT and Canadian Teachers’ Federation collaborative in-service workshop for teachers in the Greater Accra Region on Friday, following similar ones held in the Central and Western regions.

“I want to draw the attention of the employer (Ghana Education Service) and the Controller and Accountant General to the fact that the introduction of the e-payslips is being seriously undermined,” he said.

The e-payslip was introduced to check the ghost names that seem to perpetually hunt Ghana’s Public Sector payroll causing government to lose millions of cedis each year.

Mr Baafi said like any change situation those who benefitted from the old system tended to resist the new order and so the newly introduced e-payslip system was “seriously undermining the laudable system.”

The larger teacher body called on the CAGD to immediately investigate the alleged sale of the codes to bring perpetrators to book. Mr Baafi expressed worry that many teachers in parts of the country had not received salary for months as a result of a validation process being undertaken by the CAGD.

He cautioned the Department not to hastily conclude that “because a school’s validation had not been done, the teachers there are “ghosts.” “There must be a means of crosschecking the non-validation, this is because everything should be done not to deprive a teacher of his/her salary because someone has erred somewhere,” he said.

The Association urged the CAGD to expedite action to pay all teachers who had suffered non-payment of salary as a result of the exercise.