About 233 resident doctors training to be specialists at the University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan, who have not been enrolled on the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System (IPPIS), are owed salaries of three months estimated to be over N100 million, FIJ has learnt.

The doctors, last paid in December 2020, are accusing the management of UCH of withholding information on the true state of situation and sabotaging its umbrella body, the Association of Resident Doctors (ARD), making it too weak to defend them.  

The IPPIS was set up in 2007 at the office of the Accountant General of the Federation, the government announcing in 2016 that the Payroll and Human Resource Database for the Federal Civil Service would be automated. Before, under the Government Integrated  Financial Management Information System (GIFMIS), salaries were paid into the accounts of ministries, departments and agencies.

In a bid to end the menace of ghost workers in its workforce, the government mandated its personnel to register on the IPPIS. But many doctors have not been enrolled on the platform, encumbering the payment of their salaries.

“For those of us who have not been migrated to the IPPIS, many of us have not been paid,” one of the doctors said. “UCH has the highest number of doctors affected by this problem.”

“While we saw evidence that other institutions were making conscious efforts to perfect the necessary documentation that would bring the IPPIS to capture their employees, we noticed that UCH did nothing — because we contacted IPPIS and they did not tell us they were coming.

“If UCH is saying that the delay in payment is because the IPPIS list was not submitted on time, from October to February, then why didn’t they submit it?”

But the President of the Association of Resident Doctors UCH chapter, Zakariaya Hussain, who has been receiving his salary, told FIJ it was painful that hundreds of his colleagues who had not been paid for three months, believed that he was not proactive.

“In terms of documentation, the University College Hospital has submitted what they needed to submit to IPPIS, I can confirm to you,” Dr Hussain said. “But as I speak to you now, they have still not come for the biometric capturing.”

He explained that notwithstanding the delay in the capture of some medical officers on the IPPIS, they should still be paid their salaries. While he added that many of the resident doctors had been receiving salaries for about a year, he could not explain why 233 doctors worked for three months without pay.

“Exactly why we have been fighting the government that they should be paid,” he said. “That is one of the reasons why we recently went on warning strike and why the National Association of Resident Doctors (NARD) declared a strike action beginning from April.”