The Controller and Accountant General, Mr. Christian Sottie, has said in view of the re-denomination of the cedi, June salaries would be paid earlier to avoid confusion. Mr Sottie said this at a forum on the public sector reforms programme for workers in the Eastern Region on Thursday at Koforidua. He said all institutions that refused personnel of the Accountant General's Department to do head counts of their staff would have their salaries stopped until they obliged. Mr Sottie said his outfit was to be sure of the work and the existence of the people they pay, hence the exercise of head counting in all institutions that are paid by the Accountant General. He said apart from the headcount, the Accountant General's Department would take pictures and fingerprints of every employee who received salary from the department as a further means of being sure that people receiving salary were working. Mr Sottie said the Controller and Accountant General's Department had the technology and the equipment to undertake that exercise. He said as part of the reforms programme, the department had been able to save government about 54 million cedis which used to be the cost of financing officers' travels across the country to check salaries by establishing treasury at all the districts. On the delay in salaries and non-payment of salaries of some workers, Mr Sottie explained that the new IPPD2 being used to pay salaries was finding difficulty in the old system that was full of mistakes. Also, delay in the processing of inputs by the various institutions to be fed into the system was a factor since the system only works according to the inputs fed into it. He said the energy crisis was also contributing to the delay in the payment of salaries since the system could not be used manually. Mr Sottie said a generator had been bought for the department and the staff was working on arrears and by July all salary issues would be addressed. The Executive Secretary of the Civil Servants Association, Mr Smart Chigabatia, called on its members to join the national health insurance scheme since it was a supplementary to the already existing civil service mutual health scheme. He said he was happy that members in the Eastern Region who broke away from the civil service scheme on the pretext that it was a duplication of the NHIS had come back realizing the importance of the scheme in health delivery. Mr Chigabatia said under the national reform programme, the government was embarking on a programme to solve tenancy problem where every civil servant irrespective of the salary could assess loan to mortgage and own a house whiles working and not until retirement. He advised workers to see the labour law as one to champion their cause and use dialogue to press their demands instead of strikes. Mr Chigabatia told them that the reform programme had captured all the concerns of the civil and public service worker and would address them and therefore strikes should be a thing of the past. Source: GNA