Accept UTAS, COEASU urges FG.
The Colleges of Education Academic Staff Union, COEASU, has advised the federal government to drop its ego and rather embrace the deployment of the University Transparency and Accountability Solution, UTAS, as a payment system in the country.
The union, in a statement, Wednesday, said, “The intractable challenge created by the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS, has been a great source of worry and constituted one of the major issues prone to the industrial crisis in the College of Education, COE system.”
IPPIS breaches the establishment integrity of the tertiary institution’s system, undermines the statutory functions of the Governing Councils, and opens the payroll up to unilateral manipulations”, it claimed in the statement, signed by its president, Dr Smart Olugbeko.
COEASU,in the statement,added that: ”Within a short time after its unilateral imposition on tertiary institutions by the FG in February 2020, academic unions’ opposition to it was vindicated as the IPPIS pay platform engendered several irregularities, such as salary omission, accommodation of ghost workers, mutilated salary, and inconsistency in payment of salary of staff on sabbatical and study leaves.”
The payment system also enables the FG to impose baseless deductions under the guise of a new tax regime shrouded in calculative mysteries at the detriment of our members,” it alleged.
“COEASU, does not only welcome UTAS, but also posits that UTAS should, indeed, be adopted for the entire tertiary education sector as it takes care of the peculiarities of the institutions including financial autonomy, sabbatical service, and the administration of discipline,” the union said in the statement.
“We have been thrown back by the latest game of sheer ego resorted to by the FG through the lazy and mischievous blackmail of UTAS because of unsubstantiated claims of inadequacy. The National Information Technology Development Agency’s (NITDA) assessment of UTAS done between the 8th and 16th of March 2022 which subjected it to 698 cases gave UTAS 97.4% and 99.3% before and after remediation respectively.
“It is against this backdrop that we hereby call on the Federal Government to drop its ego, accept UTAS as a payment solution in all tertiary institutions in Nigeria whose functions and structure are different from the mainstream ministries.”
Açcording to COEASU, All over the world, research is the fulcrum of the academic community where academics proffer solutions to problems and evolve templates for development.
