Enumerators, other staff from H2H Registration still to be paid

Several persons who were employed to work during the recently concluded House-to-House Registration process and stationed at the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Grove/Diamond, East Bank Demerara (EBD) cluster office are yet to receive payments for their services.

Although close to two months have elapsed since the House-to-House Registration activities began, and with the registration process now halted, those workers are still waiting for their salaries. House to House Registration began on July 20, 2019.
However, a senior source at the GECOM head office confirmed to Guyana Times that several workers have indeed not been paid but assured that within days they will receive their monies.
He stated that the sloth in the payment process is not the fault of persons employed at the head office or even the accounting staff, but that the proper documentation to process payments from the Grove/Diamond Cluster Office was not sent in a timely manner.
“It is not a withholding. What has happened is that when the first payroll was done, apparently there were some changes in the appointment letter, some people came on after and so on so we had prepared a supplemental payroll. We prepared a payroll for that area already but some people, for whatever reason, were left off the payroll, the timesheet was not submitted on time etc,” the source said.
It was further explained that the payroll was processed on Friday and that payments will be ready on the first working day of next week (Monday) but it was reiterated that the accounts department at GECOM cannot make payments if it does not receive the proper documentation and verification to do so.
“We have paid over 5000 people around the country and it is not unusual that you will have a situation where the records submitted from the field office to the head office, sometimes there are some challenges there. Anyhow, the matter at hand is that we have it prepared and they will be paid on Monday and this…the payroll is already prepared. This was not a deliberate act, this is out of the fact that some timesheets were not submitted in a particular time,” he added.
On Friday morning several persons who were not paid from the Diamond/ Grove GECOM office complained about the non-payments of their salaries for the month of July.
One man stated that every time they enquire about their rightfully earned monies, they are redirected, without proper explanations, as to why there was such a lengthy delay.
“No feedback was given and whenever we question the status of our salary we are told that we will be paid. We all have families to feed…I’m very much disappointed in this organisation…This issue is of great concern and very worrying for some of us who would have invested the little we had to go to and from work in the hot sun,” he lamented.