After November’s abortive bid, the State government is pressing on with the e-billing system for paying salaries to its employees through treasuries from December 1.
Treasury Department sources told The Hindu here on Thursday that the maiden attempt failed for want of sufficient arrangements.
They said that to introduce e-billing to pay the salaries of self-drawing officers, the government had now decided to extend it to all 23 district-level treasuries from December.
While making the first attempt, treasuries in the State capital and all districts reported glitches in the new payment disbursal system, launched by integrating Spark, an open source platform optimised for business houses and other organisations, with the software Treasury Information System. As the system failed, officials were forced to return to the old payment mode.
The employees have now been directed to revive the system within 15 days. But no SWOT (strength, weakness, opportunities, threats) analysis of it has been done. Nor have the staff members been trained to handle exigencies. Since payment of salaries is a sensitive issue, disruption in payment will lead to a volatile situation, sources said.
Many payments
The 10 per cent dearness allowance announced for five lakh employees and three lakh pensioners has to be computed this month. The treasuries will have to make two major payments within 20 days in December, the salary of November and the advance payment for Christmas. The switchover without safeguards is feared to complicate the payment system.
As the capacity of the server has not been enhanced, the whole process will likely be slow. The hassles such as poor infrastructure have not been addressed.
The haste shown in adopting the new system is reported to be aimed at routing all payments through nationalised banks and doing away with the treasury system, citing problems in the payment system.
Thus, the Treasury Department will become extinct in due course, sources shared their fear.
