By Delvardo Emmanuel
Journal Staff Writer

Following challenges with past payments of workers in the 52-week program,
Minister of Labour and Public Service Pia Glover-Rolle said the government is
looking to modernize the way of processing payments.
“The issue is, and we have spoken to this since day one. We have antiquated
systems in the Public Service,” Glover-Rolle said.
“We’re still doing a lot of things in a manual way and with the size of our public
service, that’s absolutely unsustainable.”
Glover-Rolle said the government is working aggressively towards a digitized
HRMIS system, a digitized financial system, which will help eliminate these
problems going into the future.
“My concern is the workers, ensuring that after they give a good day’s work, they
get a good day’s pay and that it’s on time,” she said.
“So, we’re working through the issues, these are not new issues, these are historic
issues. Historical issues, but issues that we hope will be the last during this
administration, as we seek to, make the necessary changes and bring the solutions
to the problem.”
Questioned if she foresees any other payment delays moving forward, the public
service minister said the ministry is doing all it can with its privy to ensure this
doesn’t happen again. However, she added that it will take a multiagency
collaborative effort.
“We’re working to ensure that there are no future delays within our purview. And I
say within our purview because this is a multi-agency approach,” she said.
“Public Service has its part, finance and treasury has their part. Once we are
ensuring that we’re all getting our work done and that our systems don’t fail us,
then we should have no more issues of late pay is my hope.”