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The Ghana Interbank Payment & Settlement Sytem (GhIPSS) says it is in the process of verifying certain irregularities that cropped up in the payment of allowances to National Service personnel since January this year.

In 2014, the National Service Secretariat (NSS) announced a new mode of payment for all national service persons. this was after a collaborative consultation between the management of GhIPSS and NSS.

GhIPSS, as a result, started the payment of allowances to service persons on 20th February, this year, chalking significant progress.

Out of the 43,000 service personnel to whom allowances were advanced in January, this year, a little over five 5,000 could not be paid by GhIPSS because of information disparity issues. in February, this year, the number of unpaid personnel rose to 8,000 necessitating investigations.

In January, payments were advanced to 38,000 personnel without any problems, registering almost 90 percent success rate.

The e-Zwich payment process arose out of previous experiences with cashbased payments to service persons to streamline payments.

Archie Hesse, executive director of GhIPSS, commenting on the payments, said his outfit has been able to validate and effect payments to over 70,000 national service personnel from all regions/districts across the country for January and February.

Dr Michael Kpese Whyte, executive director of NSS, said that “in the course of payments, some irregularities have been observed which needs further verification. these include multiple use of nss numbers, duplicated e- Zwich numbers, records with no e-Zwich numbers and transpositional errors in names.

“These challenges have been brought to the attention of the NSS for review and confirmation. We are aware that the secretariat is presently working on this task which requires records being sent from the national Head office through the regional office to district offices for the confirmation of personnel.”

He therefore urged service personnel and head of institutions to take keen interest in the prompt completion of personnel data to speed up the verification and validation process which is a requirement for payment of allowances