The Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF) assumed on Monday that the delays in the payment of salaries of the Defense and Security Forces (FDS) are due to registration problems in the new payment system as part of the implementation of the Single Salary Table (TSU).

At issue is the migration, which began in June, of the system for paying police and military salaries to the Ministry of Economy and Finance, a process that used to be carried out by the ministries of the Interior and Defense.

"We are working with human resources to make all the necessary information available to register employees at 100%," said Manuel Matavel, national director of Public Accounting, during a press conference in Maputo.

The military and police "had a parallel payroll system and it was decided that they also had to migrate to a single state payroll," said Manuel Matavel, quoted by Lusa.

This was the statement made by the Ministry of Economy after, on Saturday, the general commander of the Police of the Republic of Mozambique (PRM) suggested a return to the previous system of paying officers' salaries in order to solve the problem of wage arrears in the corporation.

"If there are conditions, [we could] return the salary so that we can solve these problems and emigrate to the new system in stages," said Bernardino Rafael.

However, for the MEF, the divergence of information on the Unique Identification Number (NUIT), Bank Identification Number (NIB), rank and date of incorporation of police and military personnel affects their registration and consequently the payment of salaries.

"The system can't generate payments if there's no NUIT and NIB. Either the payment order is reversed or it is not generated in the system," said Manuel Matavel, noting that back payments will also be made when the problem is resolved.

According to Matavel, 94% of the Interior Ministry's staff have been registered, 97% of whom have already received their June salary, and in the Defense Ministry 95% of the staff have been registered, 94% of whom have also received their salary.

The official also said that once the registration process is finished, the system will be "cleaned" so that there is "consistent and clean data", with the aim of paying the salaries of the military and police in an "automatic and normal" way.