Price Waterhouse creates crisis

 

In its lead headline story, the Statesman cautions that the Price Waterhouse report, which is supposed to give relief to Ghanaian workers in higher salaries and wages, is about to throw the nation into a constitutional crisis as workers have threatened to drag the government to the Supreme Court.

The story says the staff of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), arming themselves with a copy of the Fourth Republican Constitution, have criticised the report as unworkable and a threat to the survival of the Service. According to the staff, the Price Waterhouse consultants, who were paid $3 million to fashion out a salary structure for the government workers, erred in law.

They said the consultants had used the IRS and other revenue collecting institutions such as the Customs, Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS) and the Value Added Tax (VAT) Service as a yardstick in fixing the new wages and salaries. Citing the Bank of Ghana, Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) and the Ghana Telecom, among other parastatals, as where the searchlight should have been in arriving at

An equitable salary structure, the IRS workers said that this is contrary to the provisions of the Constitution. The Statesman says the consultants, in determining the new salary structure, whose implementation started this month, were instructed to use the constitutional provision which provides for equal pay for workers who perform the same duties in government services.