The Integrated Personnel Payroll Information System (IPPIS) would not in any way tamper with the autonomy of the Nigerian university system as it is targeted at preventing wastages and leakages by ensuring staff remuneration is based on correct information, IPPIS Coordinator, Mrs. Nana Fatima Mede, has said.
Mede who was speaking at a one-day sensitisation workshop on IPPIS conducted for universities and other institutions in the North West, he said the new system will also ensure prompt payment of salaries directly to employees’ accounts with appropriate deductions and remittances of third party payments like tax, pension, cooperatives and union dues.
According to her, the workshop was aimed at critically examining some of the challenges of the new system with a view to brainstorming and coming up with a clear and well defined formula that would be acceptable to all.
She said the system roll-out which started in 2007 has 257,516 employees as at March 2014 drawn from 308 Ministries, Department and Agencies (MDAs), including 123 non-care agencies, 17 Teaching Hospitals and Medical Centres and 10 Colleges of Agriculture and Veterinary Science.
The IPPIS is part of the transformation agenda of the federal government aimed at creating a centralised data base system to aid government’s manpower planning and decision making saying that will also to facilitate automation and storage of personnel records.
This system is capable of handling primary, secondary even tertiary assignments and can design template that will accommodate sabbatical, tenure and contract appointments as well as having high levels of security and control that make it flexible and secure.
In his remarks, Bayero University Vice Chancellor, Professor Abubakar Adamu Rasheed, said the new system can work effectively and enhance the payroll system if it addresses some peculiarities of Nigerian universities such as staff on study fellowship abroad, sabbatical and other similar issues. He urged the federal government to strive to carry along all the university unions through incorporating all their concerns and to exercise patience as the system is gradually put to practice.
