The federal government has directed the Nigerian Military and all other institutions formerly excluded to migrate into the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) immediately.

Vice President Yomi Osinbajo made this disclosure yesterday while speaking on the second day of the ongoing 21st Nigeria Economic Summit (NES) in Abuja.

Osinbajo stated that the measure became necessary as it would enable government know the exact number of public servants and precisely how much is required for their salaries.

He said: “We have the IPPIS, the electronic platform for payment of salaries of public servants. This is one of the main ways of checking ghost workers; we are now able to discover precisely how many public servants there are.

“Now, directives have been given to the military and other institutions that were not part of IPPIS to go into the platform; we are likely to become more certain of the number of public servants there are and exactly how much is spent on remuneration of public servants.”

The vice president who was speaking on government institutional reform agenda added that there is also the Government Integrated Financial Management System (GIFMS), a system that tries to match expenditure to budget in such a way that the Accountant General of the Federation and all the financial managers are able to see what is coming in, what is going out and what is being spent as per the budget.

He said that all these are with a view to enabling fiscal transparency and discipline, adding that the reform of public institutions is critical for accountability and transparent use of public resources.

“The main objective of our public institution reform is to enhance the capacity of these institutions to deliver public goods effectively in response to citizens’ needs and demands,” he said.

He disclosed that the key elements of this administration’s institutional reform agenda include transparency and accountability, non-discrimination, impartiality of access, equality, fairness and due process in service delivery.

Others are professionalism aimed at promoting a culture of integrity and effective use of public resources, respect for human rights, creating the environment for enhanced competitiveness in the private sector, fiscal discipline, revenue diversification and efficiency of collection of government revenues.

He explained that unlike before, when many government revenue generating agencies, such as the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), kept many accounts, some of which were unknown to government, the treasury single account policy being implemented by the current administration would ensure that all government revenues come through the Central Bank of Nigeria and can then be spent after proper appropriation by the National Assembly.

He further stated that a policy driven budget is also a major part of the current administration’s reform agenda, adding that the budget office and national planning commission are presently working together to draw up medium term plan, and define properly the policies that would drive the budget.

“One of the key issue is we are doing a bottom-up type of reasoning for our economic planning, what we are taking into account is the large number of extremely poor people as a basis for economic planning process. We have managed to integrate, in terms of working together for presentation of this policy paper, the national planning commission and the budget office of the federation and both agencies have been working seriously to produce this document which will be important in the economic planning and the work of the government in the next few months,” he said.