The Controller and Accountant General’s Department (CAGD) has recently come up with two new developments for the third parties, Associations and other institutions that deal with the CAGD. These developments are:

Online Registration

Hitherto new members join Associations in their working sectors by filling forms manually and being mechanized at the CAGD. Henceforth, these manually filled forms are no longer accepted at the CAGD. The new directive from the CAGD on the November, 2015 and signed by George Kofi Baah Head-Payroll Processing directorate for CAGD is that  interested the individual, in the comfort of his/her room, sits behind his/her computer or with her phone in his/her hand goes to:

1. www.gogpayslip.com
2. Follow the prompts to open
3. Click on Associations to open
4. Click on the Association of your choice (NAGRAT)
5. Click on send to confirm
6. You will get a feedback and your wish is done
7. If the Association-NAGRAT- you chose does not reflect on your payslip the following month, try the exercise above once again.
8. If on two or three occasions, it does not go through, please come to the Regional Secretariat for help.

Wrongful Deduction of Claims

It is a fact that certain mistakes do occur at the CAGD and one of these is wrongful deduction. You may not be a member of a particular Association, yet CAGD deducts you for that Association CAGD may also deducts you double or more for that Association. Earlier, when this happened, you wrote to the Association and attached your payslip for stoppage and later when deductions stop, you apply for a refund. Now getting the wrongful deduction(s) stopped and refunded is no longer manually done. From CAGD, it must be done online and these are the steps:

1. Go to www.gogpayslip.com
2. Follow the prompts to open
3. Go to wrongful deduction and make your complaint by typing whatever your complaint is
4. Click on send. You will get a feedback
5. Your complaint is taken and your refund will later be on your payslip.
6. Once the refund appears on your payslip, it simply means that you have been paid.

Intended Strike by teachers Unions

The leadership of the three teacher unions, namely: NAGRAT, GNAT and CCT held a meeting on Friday 12th February, 2012, of course, engineered by NAGRAT, to resurrect the old unresolved grievances. These are:

1. Unpaid Maintenance Allowances
2. Transfer grants
3. Promotion upgrading without arrears
4. Only 3 months’ salary paid to newly recruited teachers
5. Newly recruited teachers not yet paid

The leadership at the end of the meeting agreed to:

1. Give government an ultimatum that if by 29th February, 2016 these grievances were not resolved once and for all; they-the unions-would embark on strike.
2. Write a letter to the Labour Commission to notify it of their intended strike.
3. Have individual union Press Conference to back their demand as follows:
   
   • GNAT Press Conference on the 16th February, 2016
   • CCT Press Conference on the 17th February, 2016
   • NAGRAT Press Conference on the 18th February, 2016

Surprisingly a meeting was called on Friday, 19th February, 2016 by the government represented by the Ministers of employment and Labour Relations, Finance, Education, Fair Wages and Salaries Commission-FWSC-Audit Service, G.E.S and the Representatives of the three Unions. It was only after the third meeting on Wednesday 24th February, 2016 that both parties agreed to the following:

• All filled documents by teachers in the Districts Municipals, Metros and Regional Education Offices be sent to Accra immediately for validation and payment.
• A team comprising the Unions and government be set up to go off-site and start the validation.
• That validation is completed in three days after which payment would be made to the effected teachers. The affected non-teaching staff is not left in this area, though it was not visibly present.

The team started its work on the 25th February, 2016 and it was given a short time to complete so that the effected teachers could be paid. However, the team could not finish within that time. The team had now been given up to 15th April, 2016 to complete its work. We were told that about 6000 forms had been validated so far, out of about 60,000 to 70,000 forms. Effected teachers were supposed to go to this website: www.gespostings.net and check if their documents had been validated or not.
How to know whether your arrears documents or applications have been queried or not, please follow the steps below to verify:

1. Visit www.gespostings.net
2. Click on arrears
3. Enter your staff ID and click search
4. If your arrears application has so far been worked on and queried it will pop up.
5. Note the documents that are absent from your application and provide them to your NAGRAT Regional Office for onward Transmission to NAGRAT Head Office they would then be forwarded to GES head office
6. If you search and your name doesn’t appear, there are one of two things possible:
   
   • Either your documents or application is yet to be worked on or
   • It has been worked on and you are successful.
7. Note that only about 8,000 out of the about a total 60,000 applications have been worked on so far and some 4,000 are successful and some 4,000 are not successful.
8. Validation by auditors is still ongoing and could be completed in the next 30 days or more.
9. Those queried should as a matter of urgency provides the documents demanded or mentioned in the query so they can be validated.
10. The teacher unions have unanimously agreed that all the validation should be completed so that payments would be done once.
11. As and when more forms are queried GES would post them on the site mentioned earlier. So continue checking.
12. Unpaid teachers who have been validated in the field would also be included in the final payment when the ongoing validation is completed.

Meanwhile a letter dated 14th March, 2015 and signed by the Director General’s office, Mr. Jacob A. M. Kor, has been sent to the Regional Directors of Education directing the District, Municipal and Metro Directorates of Education to send all received documents to the Regional Directorates for a team sent from the Headquarters to collect and send them to the validation center. In the same vein, both the teacher unions and TEWU on one hand and the government on the other, had a Press Conference on the same issue on the 15th March, 2016 as follows:

Press Conference

The Teacher Unions (Ghana National Association of Teachers, National Association of Graduate Teachers and Coalition of Concerned Teachers) as well as the Teachers and Education Workers Union together with the Fair Wages and Salaries Commission, Audit Service, Ministry of Finance, Controller and Accountant-General’s Department and the Ghana Education Service, wish to bring to the notice of all teachers and workers within the Ghana Education Service that the validation of salary arrears of affected members is ongoing.
The off-site team, working on the validation, has so far received application forms in excess of sixty thousand (60,000) and wishes to assure all the affected teachers and other workers within the Ghana Education Service that the forms are being worked on.
However, all applicants, District and Regional Directors of Education have up to 18th of March, 2016 to forward the rest of the date (if any) to Ghana Education Service Headquarters for onward submission to the validation team for validation and subsequent payment.
In order to ensure that the validation exercise progresses successfully, the following have to be duly adhered to by the affected staff and authorities involved:
The affected staff should visit the web page: www.gesposting.net and click on arrears to check on the status of the validation. The search might produce results such as:
A.    No information, or
B.    A list of documents

A.    Means either your particulars are yet to be keyed in or submitted to the Audit Service.
B.    Requires the applicant to provide the document(s) listed to the appropriate office for onward submission to the Ghana Education Service Headquarters for prompt action.
The off-site team has agreed that the arrears due to deserving beneficiaries should be paid immediately after the close of the validation exercise, which is expected to end on the 15th April of 2016.
We wish, therefore, to advise both new applicants and those whose forms were queried to urgently respond to the queries to enable the validating team validate their document(s) for prompt payment of the salary arrears.
All the unpaid staff, who were at post during the period of validation in the various regions, shall also be considered in the final payment of arrears. 
Per the work done so far under our watch, we (the Unions) are very optimistic that every member who follows the procedure shall receive his/her arrears without further delay after the validation exercise.

We are therefore asking our effected members to exercise restraint and go by the directive given to check the state of their documents if validated or otherwise, by going to: www.gespostings.net. It had been agreed by both sides that all the documents had to be validated before payment is affected.

ZONAL CHAIRMEN FOR NAGRAT-ASHANTI