Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun, said yesterday in Abuja that some Federal Government agencies and departments were witnessing delays in payment of their staff salaries because they had exhausted their allocations.
The minister, who disclosed this while fielding questions from State House correspondents at the end of the Federal Executive Council, FEC, meeting at the Presidential Villa, however, said efforts were being made to resolve the issue.
She said: “The issue of agencies that have not received their salaries, let me explain how the salary system works.
‘’All the agencies have an allocational IPIS which is the salary platform. If, for example, an agency has a salary of N12 billion for the year, what we insist they should do is continue to pay until that N12 billion is exhausted.
“Now what happens with the number of agencies is that the number of staff I had was more than the budgetary allocation.
“Instead of taking N1 billion a month, it was taking N1.2billion or N1.3billion. So by the time it got to October, many agencies had exhausted their allocation.
“What we did in the virement we sent to the National Assembly which it approved, listed all the agencies that had problems with their salaries and applied to National Assembly.
We had to go back to the National Assembly to ask for an increase in the budgetary allocation of those agencies.
“We received that virement advice from the National Assembly on Monday this week; we are waiting to log it onto the system so that we can now pay those agencies.”