About 26,589 public sector workers’ salaries have been suspended for their failure to adhere to a directive by the Ministry of Finance to biometrically update their data with the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT).

Speaking in an interview with the Ghana News Agency, Mr George Baah, Head of Payroll at CAGD said at least 457,595 public sector workers had complied with the directive and would receive their salary for April.  He said: “We started having the discussion with SSNIT as far back as 2015 when SSNIT started rolling out the biometric registration exercise, so in May 2016,  the CAGD issued a press release asking the employees on the mechanised payroll to take advantage of the SSNIT enrolment because that was going to be used as a means for validation.

  “In August 2016 there was another press statement and then in December there was another press statement, so as and when SSNIT employees go through the process and SSNIT sends the data to update the system.

“We gave a deadline that in February that employee who has not gone through the process, their salaries will be suspended. “We wanted to take action in March but Management decided to allow more time for those outstanding employees to go through the process.  He said until April 1, 26,589 had not registered and their salaries have been suspended.

Meanwhile, the National Association of Graduate Teachers has warned of massive labour unrest if the Ministry of Finance goes ahead to instruct the CAGD to delete the names of its members from the payroll. The Association has appealed to the Ministry to suspend its intended action and to extend its deadline from April to May 2017 to enable it to get its members in the hinterlands, whose names were not in the SSNIT biometric register, to do so.