Nigerian government says it has agreed to modify its payment platform, the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System (IPPIS) to accommodate the peculiarities of the University Transparency Accountability System (UTAS) and Universities Peculiar Personnel Payroll System (UP3S).
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has been on strike for eight months over disagreement with the federal government, based on ASUU’s claim that government had breached agreements reached since 2019 on the peculiarities of their individual payment platforms – UTAS, IPPIS, among others.
However, “The lecturers were told that the IPPIS will be modified to accommodate the peculiarities of UTAS. It will be too expensive to run two payment platforms concurrently,” Intelregion quoted an anonymous source as saying.
The UTAS is a payment system developed by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) for the payment of salaries and allowances of university lecturers.
Also, the UP3S was developed by the Joint Action Committee of the Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities and the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (JAC) for same purpose.
To find a lasting solution, members of the House of Representatives headed by the Speaker, Femi Gbajabiamila, had a meeting with ASUU’s executive on Monday.
The meeting having yielded the desired result led to the latest development prompting the government to modify the IPPIS in other to meet ASUU demands.
Meanwhile, members of the National Executive Council of ASUU will meet on Thursday, October 13, to take a formal stance on the eight-month-old strike.
The outcome of the meeting would result in suspension of the strike on late Thursday or Friday morning.
