Implementation of Digital Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System: Lesson from Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria
Abstract
Management of public finance in Africa and even beyond has been suffering a setback for quite some decades now. This is partly because the management of public finance was based on manual and semi-manual operations. This situation gave birth to several personnel and payroll irregularities and fraudulent behaviours. To mitigate against this ugly scenario, countries in Africa deemed it fit that financial services in the public sectors be migrated to be digitally-based. This informed the advent of digital integrated personnel and payroll information systems of most African countries. The introduction of the electronic financial governance system in the public sector of the African economies was immensely clouded with several shortcomings. It is because of this, that this paper attempts to examine the effectiveness, identify the challenges and the mitigating factors put in place to cushion the effects of the challenges using IPPIS or IPPD as the case might be. Using three African countries, namely, Kenya, Ghana and Nigeria, the paper found via views articulated from journal articles, newspapers and a few published works that IPPIS or IPPD has achieved some level of success in term of accuracy, timeliness, reliability in personnel and financial data generation and processing. These helped in weeding out ghost workers, resulting in huge financial savings for the government. Notwithstanding, pockets of challenges were found, namely, lack of Oracle-based training and retraining and arbitrary posting of IPPIS staff, inability to carry out data cleansing exercise before migrating them to the digital devices, failure to introduce any relevant modules that could cover some personnel and payroll activities like staff retirement and termination of appointment. To avert these troubles, some mitigating strategies like improved version and Oracle-based system of the IPPIS or IPPD were developed. Also, there is an existing policy in some of the countries stipulating that IPPIS staff can only be posted after three years on the desk and should only be moved to a similar desk in MDAs where IPPIS is operational. The paper recommends, among others, that no technology is perfect, therefore, there is a need for continuous improvement and upgrades in the digital facilities for managing public finance to stay ahead of the challenges. Again, data cleansing exercise should be thoroughly carried out before they are migrated from paper to digital devices
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