Accra, June 14, GNA - Government on Wednesday said it was committed to pay all health workers the new salaries agreed together with a third of the arrears by the end of June, 2006 as promised by President John Agyekum Kufuor.

This followed a confirmation by the Controller and Accountant-General that the new salaries and one-third of the arrears could be paid in advance on June 19 to the 34,000 health workers. At a meeting to redress anomalies that have come up in the data submitted to the Controller and Accountant-General for onward payment of salaries of the health service staff, Government said it was ready to pay health staff next week.

Major Courage Quashigah (rtd), Minister of Health; Mr Kwamena Bartels, Minister of Information and National Orientation; Human Resource Managers of all the health institutions in the country and all Deputy Controller and Accountant-Generals (CAGs) attended the meeting. The meeting saw the Controller and Accountant General's Department saying that data submitted to it was fraught with problems.

"They include duplication of names; inaccuracies where names are repeated two or three times with the same staff identification numbers and discrepancies in promotions; where cleaners are represented and paid as doctors; orderlies as dispensing technicians; night watchmen as community health nurses and others where men are shown as women," a press statement signed by Mr Bartels said.

Mr Adjei Mensah, Deputy CAG, said some names were totally eliminated from the data presented, even though, they were noted names on the Controller's list as staff within the health service scheme. He said some names were presented as health workers even though they were defined in the list as from the Ghana National Fire Service and the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development and Environment. The statement said the Human Resource Managers with staff of the C&AGD were at present in Accra to clean up the data to ensure that the rest of the anomalies were rectified.

The statement said the 34,000 health service staff with no problems associated with their data would be paid in advance on Monday June 19 while the rest would be paid at the end of June when the data submitted had been cleaned up.

Mr Adjei did not state how much the Government could have lost in the process, but noted that the new Integrated Personnel Payroll Database, known as IPPD 2 System, would not have gone any further in processing the data fed into it.

The statement charged human resource managers to explain the new scales to their health staff to ensure that the new system was understood and worked with.

The statement appealed to the health workers group to call off their strike action and resume work in the interest of the injured, sick, children and pregnant women, who were suffering as a result of their absence from the various health centres.