The manual payroll is prone to abuse and may lead to the loss of public funds due to lack of proper controls,” Ms Nyakango said. Some of the counties that were reported to have paid billions in salaries manually include Bomet County which led with Ksh 1.24 billion followed by Nakuru County with Ksh 1.06 billion and Garissa County with Ksh 1.03 billion
By Lavin Atieno
All the 47 counties in Kenya have until the end of October to revert to using the Unified Human Resource Information System (UHRS) to help seal loopholes that were abused by governments in the devolved units that started processing employee salaries manually.
According to a report by the Controller of Budget (CoB) Margaret Nyakango, county administrators paid Ksh. 15.6 billion in salaries by the end of June 2022. Out of that amount Ksh. 3.6 billion was paid between April and June. On their part, counties cited the lack of personal numbers forcing them to process salaries manually.
“County governments cited lack of Personal Numbers for failing to process all salaries in the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Database (IPPD) system. This is contrary to Government policy, which requires wages to be processed through the IPPD system. The manual payroll is prone to abuse and may lead to the loss of public funds due to lack of proper controls,” Ms Nyakango said. Some of the counties that were reported to have paid billions in salaries manually include Bomet County which led with Ksh 1.24 billion followed by Nakuru County with Ksh 1.06 billion and Garissa County with Ksh 1.03 billion.
The only counties whose expenditure was within the 35% ceiling include Mandera county, Tana River county, Isiolo and Kwale counties, at 28.4%, 29.6%, 33.1% and 34.9%, respectively,” Ms Nyakango observed.
Following the large expenditure by the counties on salaries, the Controller of Budget has urged county governments to fast-track the acquisition of staff personal numbers. County governments are required to migrate to the Unified Human Resource Information System by October 2022 in line with the guidelines by the Head of Public Service,” CoB Nyakango said. All 47 counties spent a total of Ksh 400.9 billion between July 2021 and June 2022. The worrying issue was that devolved units were spending heavily during the last financial year before the elections where nearly half of their total expenditure was on salaries and allowances.
