The Department of Personnel Management (DPM) has hosted a three-day Human Resource workshop in Port Moresby on Data Cleansing of the Government’s Ascender Payroll system which ends today, May 1st.
The theme for this forum is ‘Enabling Digital HR through HR Policy & Business Process Automation Making’.
The Data Cleansing forum was the first to be held in 23 years which has seen stakeholders from both the public and private sectors attending.
Deputy Secretary, of Human Resources and Advisory Services, Constance Baisi said the government is in the process of upgrading the current government payroll system from Version 12 to Version 22.
DPM as the custodian of the government’s HR data and HR Policy that forms the whole of government framework of the Ascender HR Payroll System wants to ensure that HR policies are reviewed and updated.
This will also see gaps in policy relevant to the system framework are adequately addressed, and every business process is configured and automated on the Integrated HR Payroll Management System.
This is to address all poorly regulated areas on payroll, for instance, unattached officers, allowances, and other loose areas on payroll that are subject to payroll fraud, system abuse and data manipulation.
“Currently the system can be easily subjected to abuse”.
Ms. Baisi said Data Cleansing is the prerequisite to enabling the automation and configuration of all HR policies and business rules.
“We need to know what sort of issues exist so that we can identify the relevant areas to be strengthened, reviewed and corrected or improved”.
The objective of the forum is to seek stakeholders’ feedback on all the issues they are facing as users of the system and to identify areas for improvement.
Stakeholder feedback is important for DPM so that it defines the problematic area that can be addressed, reviewed or updated so that all areas are rightfully configured effectively.
Ms Baisi said data cleansing is an Integrated Monetary Fund benchmark as part of its conditions for the government’s loan requirements.
“So we are playing a pivotal role here on the part of the government”.
The Deloitte audit as well has also identified critical areas in policy, system and payroll data that also forms areas of focus for the data cleansing exercise and DPM will complement these findings by adding more to the problem areas.