The Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF), Mr Ahmed Idris, says the Federal Government plans to begins payment of staff salaries by the 25th of every month, as directed by President Muhammadu Buhari.Idris, who disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Wednesday, said “this is going tobe given a test, I believe, by this month’’.The AGF also said that the government was working on a new arrangement, which,if approved, would ensure payment of the salaries before the monthly meeting of the Federal Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC).According to him, usually, salaries are paidafter the FAAC meeting, where revenue accruing to the federation’s account are shared between the federal, state and localgovernments.“There is a standing instruction of Mr President to pay salary on or before 24 or 25 of every month and we will try as much as possible to comply and to abide by that.“We are taking a step further to make a provision whereby we can accommodate salary payments even before FAAC.“This is going to be given a test I believe by this month.“We will go to seek for necessary approval of our political masters to make sure that at least salary and other statutory payments are made even before FAAC.“Because we can project how much they are and therefore we can prepare and hit the ground running to make them realisable and actualised.“Even where we delay FAAC, we can still pay salary.’’Idris dispelled the widely held belief that the Treasury Single Account (TSA) policy is responsible for the delay in the payment of salaries and attributed the situation to the crash in global oil prices, which has affected the inflow of income to the country
Credit: Leadership
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