Maputo, 16 Aug (AIM) – The audit underway in the Mozambican Defence and Interior Ministries to ensure greater transparency in the payment of wages, through the electronic payroll (e-folha), should be completed by the end of September.
According to the Deputy Minister of Economy and Finance, Amílcar Tivane, who was speaking to reporters on Tuesday at the end of the weekly meeting of the Council of Ministers (Cabinet), “by the end of August, the Ministry of Economy and Finance will begin the exercise of registering the military personnel of the Defence and Security Forces (FDS), guaranteeing that there will be funds for the full payment of wage arrears.”
“We need to understand the complexity of the reform, and therefore the wealth of information that is needed, relating to the employees’ attributes and others associated with their career in the specific area”, he added.
In mid-July, the Defence Ministry claimed there was no evidence that about 7,000 “ghost soldiers”, who did not exist, were unduly receiving wages.
The alleged discovery of ghost soldiers was the result of a “proof of life” exercise carried out in 2022 in the public administration, in which all state employees and agents were asked to prove their existence.
Once the process was finalised and the accounts done, it was allegedly discovered that there were around 7,000 military personnel who were only on the payroll, but who did not really exist.
However, when asked if the soldiers had already been paid their wages, Tivane declined to give the exact number of soldiers currently registered,
“Regarding the staff, I will not go into metrics here, since this is information related to the Defence and Security Forces; but the most important thing is to stress that all efforts are being made to ensure that, in the coming days, we conclude the regularisation of the wage arrears”, he said.
According to Tivane, the current system for paying wages in the FDS will gradually be discontinued, moving to the new system (e-folha), a platform that involves efficient information processing.
“What we have to do is check the quality of the information, enter it into the system, run the payroll generation model, check that the wages for each member of the Defence and Security Forces correspond to what would be expected and the sectors must validate it”, Tivane said.
With regard to the wages of civilian state employees, Tivane said that so far the data for 95,000 out of a total of 385,000 employees has been processed, which could reduce the late payment of wages that has taken place in recent months.
(AIM)
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