Police officers are seen during a parade march on Uganda's Indipendence Day on October 9, 2022 at Kololo Independence Grounds. PHOTO/HANDOUT
Uganda Police Force has confirmed reports of some officers missing salaries. Police Accounting Officer, Mr Aggrey Wunyi, said the majority of the officers who missed salary had either deserted or had a mismatch in their names, bank details, and date of birth. “
The Uganda Police Force hereby clarifies that police officers are regularly paid their salaries at the end of each month. However, there are cases of salary delays affecting individual officers due to circumstances that vary from one officer to another,” Mr Wunyi said on Friday. Several police officers have been complaining about the delay in payment of their salaries, while others said they had been removed from the payroll. The issue was raised in Parliament last month.
Mr Wunyi said in 2013, the Auditor General conducted a validation exercise for all government employees, but some officers failed to meet the requirements since they didn’t have national identity cards, while others had discrepancies in their names and date of birth. The Auditor General categorised such officers as partially validated and directed that they have to fulfil the requirements first if they are to be maintained on the payroll.
Mr Wunyi said some of the affected officers didn’t bother to correct their documentation and submit it to the relevant authorities, which prompted the payment system to knock them out. Mr Wunyi said since January, 86 officers were declared deserters after they disappeared from work. Only 65 officers returned after their salary payments had been halted.
Malinga’ s case
The police accounting officer said Constable Raymond Moses Malinga, number 38486, who appeared in Monitor on May 15, is one of them. Mr Malinga hasn’t received his salary worth Shs42m for eight years. But Mr Wunyi said he was declared a deserter under case reference HRM 40/131/01 dated April 9, 2015, while deployed in Kakiri Town Council, Wakiso District.
“In 2019, Malinga defiled a 17-year-old girl, which later turned out to be a rape case after proving that the girl was aged 18 years. The case was registered at Jinja Road under CRB 863/2019. He was arrested, detained at Jinja Road Police Station, escaped from lawful custody, was rearrested and charged with escape from lawful custody, arraigned in court, and remanded to Luzira Prison on 16th October 2020. Malinga was later granted bail, never reported back, and a warrant of arrest was issued,” he said.
He said under section 29(1) of the Police Act, Mr Malinga cannot be paid for the time he was a deserter.
“No pay shall accrue to any police officer in respect to any day during which he or she is absent from duty without leave or is undergoing any sentence of imprisonment,” section 29(1) of the Police Act states.
Other issues
He said other officers have inconsistencies in dates of birth records that the system automatically indicated they were retired in March last year, and their salary payments had to be stopped.
“This was due to inconsistencies in dates of birth records in the payroll system, personal file records, and NIRA records. There were 426 officers. We cleared 104 of them, and they are now back on the payroll. Around 179 officers were retired, while 143 officers have mismatches in their dates of birth, so they aren’t getting salary until those issues are resolved,” he said.
He added that the new payment system, which the government implemented in October 2024, is very sensitive to inconsistencies that once there is a mismatch between the individual officer’s bank account and the national identity card details, the sent salary will automatically bounce back to the sender. For instance, some officers’ national identity card details have three names, while the bank accounts have only two names.
The payment system detects such an account as a ghost. He said a fraction of officers are experiencing delays in payment of their salaries due to the migration of data from the Integrated Personnel Payroll System (IPPS) to the new Human Capital Management system (HCM), which started in October last year. “Migration of data is still ongoing. Payment on the two systems does not run concurrently. Salaries on HCM are paid first, then the process of payment on IPPS starts. This is to avoid double payments. The two systems, however, do not cause missing salaries but delays for those still on IPPS. The process is underway to ensure all are migrated to the HCM system,” he said.
Deserters
Officers who desert work are removed from the payroll. When such officers reappear, they are subjected to a disciplinary process, which sometimes takes a long time, hence delays in salary payment. Since January 2025, 86 officers were declared deserters, 65 returned and are undergoing disciplinary trials,– Aggrey Wunyi, the police accounting officer.
