The January 2015 salaries of about 14,000 public sector workers in the Greater Accra Region will be delayed.

This comes on the back of the fail­ure of some unit heads in the region to validate and certify their employees to be paid for the month of January 2015.

The Controller and Accountant General's Department (CAGD) has, however, given an opportunity to the Heads of Departments and Manage­ment Units in the region who did not validate their employees to do so be­tween Monday, January 26 to Tues­day, January 27, 2015.

This, according to the CAGD, will enable it prepare a supplementary pay­roll for the affected employees for payment by February 2015.

The Controller, however, indicated that all employees on the mechanised payroll have been paid their salaries for January 2015.

The CAGD, in a bid to clean up the payroll system, introduced an online Payment Voucher Validation System.

The payment voucher is a report that shows all the employees at a par­ticular institution together with their payment details.

In the past, these reports were gen­erated and printed manually and sent to all the institutions for the head of the institution to verify them.

But with the introduction of an on­line version of the same report, the process of validation has been made much simpler and quicker.

The heads of the various institu­tions are now expected to go online each month and validate the employ­ees listed under their institution.

Failure to do this will result in the employees being suspended.

This new system has been in use since mid-2014 and it started with the Greater Accra Region; it is being rolled out to the other regions.

Currently, the CAGD is training unit heads in the Northern Region and then, gradually, the other regions will be roped in the online verification sys­tem.

According to the Controller, the validation and certification of the pay­ment vouchers is a mandatory require­ment for that the payment of salaries of employees in a management unit.

It thus warned all unit heads to note that the government policy and Regulation 3014 of the Financial Administration Regulation 2004 (LI 1802) which requires heads of departments and management units to validate and certify their payment vouchers before their salaries could be paid by the CAGD.

The list of the affected manage­ment units in the Greater Accra Re­gion has been published on the CAGD's website on www.cagd.gov.gh.