The Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS) office is accusing university administrators saying that they provided a payroll list containing dead staff for salary payment.
The government was reacting to accusations by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) that IPPIS paid dead staff and generally slashed its members’ salaries by up to 50 per cent.
On Monday, a statement was issued by the Director of Information, Press and Public Relations, Henshaw Oguike, IPPIS which explained why staff of tertiary institutions were paid less than what individual universities were paying them.
“On the alleged payment to dead university staff. It means the institutions deliberately forwarded to IPPIS the list containing dead ASUU members as being part of their personnel to get more personnel fund.
“It is the responsibility of the institutions or agencies to inform the IPPIS office about death, resignation or exit from service before due date. We sent payroll analysis to the tertiary institution bursars for review of any omission or names to be excluded,” the statement said.
IPPIS pointed out that prior the migration to IPPIS, institutions were not making the correct rates of deductions of taxes and other deductions like PAYE, NHF deductions and contributing pension from their staff.
“The request by the tertiary institution unions to formalise tax evasion through IPPIS is not only untenable, but unpatriotic request to violate extant laws on tax,” it added.
The office described the complaints as “cheap propaganda by ASUU to denigrate IPPIS for obvious reasons.”
IPPIS stated that payment of allowances was based on the salary structure as approved by Salaries, Incomes and Wages Commission (SIWC).
“Any other salaries and allowances approved by any other agency in Nigeria which are not formalised by these two agencies will amount to illegal payment.”
It added that pay slips for February, March and April 2020 were forwarded by IPPIS to the mail boxes of bursars of the tertiary institutions to aid them in generating such pay slips in order to distribute to their staff while the institutions have been advised to furnish IPPIS with active emails of their staff to enable IPPIS forward individual pay slips to their various emails in addition to bulk release of pay slips to the various institutions.
