*Says IPPIS is fraud-prone, ghost worker-friendly

By Chioma Onuegbu – Uyo

CALABAR zone of Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, has explained that it preferred the University Transparency and Accountability Solution, UTAS, as a platform of payment in the university system to the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS).

The coordinator of the zone, Dr. Aniekan Brown of the Department of Sociology & Anthropology, University of Uyo (UNIUYO), who spoke on Friday in Uyo explained that unlike the IPPIS, the UTAS is fraud and corruption-proof.

Brown lamented that the average of N5billion which Nigeria spends annually to service the IPPIS payment platform which is run by a private company in the United States, if invested in the Computer Science/Engineering faculties in the country would help to accomplish a lot.

He explained that it was imperative to let Nigerians understand that ASUU was kicking against the IPPIS because it is corruption-prone and ghost worker-friendly contrary to the reason the federal government sold to them that is was meant to curb corruption and other excesses in the payment process.

His words, “They are coming with a smokescreen that they are fighting corruption when this idea of Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) is even corruption compliant.

“Make no mistake, the union cannot rise against corruption. In fact, if there is any fight the union has engaged itself over the decades, it is the fight against corruption.

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“ASUU has gone on to produce an alternative template, the University Transparency and Accountability Solution (UTAS) that would be truly fraud and corruption-proof, unlike the IPPIS template, which is ghost worker-friendly.

“Please note that IPPIS has no law backing it so it is an illegal thing and people are benefitting from it. We also know that this thing called IPPIS is fraud compliant, so we must insist that it is wrong.

“Nigerians should be interested in knowing the ulterior motivation for imposing this obnoxious and fraud-prone IPPIS on the nation’s university system in a manner never done anywhere else in the world”

The ASUU zonal coordinator frowned at what it described as a neo-colonial arrangement of thinking that anything that comes from abroad is better even when not suitable with the realities on ground in the country.

He stressed that the template for the IPPIS as it is does not cover the peculiarities of universities, saying, “IPPIS came from abroad and Nigeria is paying a whole lot to service that.

“Check the budgetary allocations and how much goes into servicing the IPPIS platform every year, which should be about N5billion, then you will know how much Nigeria is wasting.

“But in this country, we have several departments of Computer science and Computer Engineering; we have those who could develop software. That is why we want to crave the indulgence of Nigerians to understand the perspective from which the union is taking this fight”, he noted

Other Union Chairmen of the seven chapters of the zone were in attendance.

VANGUARD