The Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) and the Ghana Community Network Services Limited (GCNet) have added another component, financial wellness and social security, to their Employee Well-being Programme (EWP).
The EPW is an initiative of the two institutions meant to oversee to the well-being of their respective employees, their immediate families as well as their areas of operations.
The country Co-ordinator of the EWP, Dr Aduana Ignea, who announced this at a sensitisation workshop in Accra, explained that the new component was aimed at counselling employees on how to manage their finances, expenses, investments and also on retirements.
The workshop was among others meant to review the operations of the EWP in 2010 and was attended by representatives from the GRA, GCNet, and the EWP as well as the Ghana Aids Commission, Ministry of Health, the Ghana Health Services, National Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis Control Programmes, National Disaster and Management Organisation, all partners of the programme.
Dr Ignea said the EWP evolved from an HIV/AIDS screening exercise in 2006 -2009 for the respective workforces of the then revenue agencies; Customs, Excise and Preventive Services (CEPS), the Internal Revenue Services (IRS), and the Value Added Tax (VAT) which have now been merged to form the GRA.
She said staff of the GRA and GCNet under the financial wellness component would be individually counselled on how to handle their finances to check mismanagement.
Dr Ignea later dispelled notions that the new component was meant to bring employees of the two institutions money.
“Some people always think I will come and give them money, no; The financial wellness component does not give money, rather we counsel employees on how to handle their financial matters, be it indebtedness, investments, retirement planning among others”, Dr Ignea noted.
She said the EWP enjoyed both financial and technical support from the German International Corporation (GIZ), and thus, disagreed with suggestions that the EWP was venturing into an area it had no expertise in.
According to the Co-ordinator “the programme will reach approximately 38,000 people by 2012”
Mr Anthony A Minlah, Commissioner, Support Services at the GRA said the EWP had helped reduce sicknesses among the authority’s staff and further reduced their medical costs.
He said; “The authority would start budgeting for the programme this year” explaining that the partners in the programme had called for a spread of the cost incurred instead of them (the partners) fully taking care of it.
“The GRA needs a healthy staff to achieve its revenue targets for the year”, Mr Minlah said and thus advised the staff to take the programme seriously.
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