Finance Secretary Fermin Atalig said yesterday that payroll funds for the Public School System personnel would be made available this week.<\/p>\n
Atalig said he is in close communications with the Bank of Guam to ensure that personnel payroll would not be interrupted.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey [PSS] can issue the payroll, I\u2019ll be responsible with the bank,\u201d said Atalig.<\/p>\n
At the same time, Atalig said that additional money would be remitted to the Public School System on or before Jan. 31, not Jan. 14 as earlier expected.<\/p>\n
The Babauta administration earlier said that $2 million of Compact Impact funds would be given to PSS Friday last week.<\/p>\n
For his part, Atalig said that he had informed the PSS about the funds\u2019 availability since Jan. 7 or when the government transferred $1.9 million to PSS.<\/p>\n
\u201cI never said Friday [Jan. 14]. What I told PSS was that the funds would be given on Jan. 31 or earlier,\u201d said Atalig.<\/p>\n
In a letter dated Jan. 7 to Education Commissioner Rita H. Inos, Atalig said that BoG \u201cwill cover all checks issued by PSS for period no. 01\/2005.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe further assured them that the DoF Treasury will transfer funds to cover all pay periods in arrears by Jan. 31, 2005 or earlier,\u201d said Atalig.<\/p>\n
PSS officials earlier warned that public schools would have to be shut down if the local government could not provide funds.<\/p>\n
PSS said that the government had failed to remit funds for the last two pay periods in December 2004.<\/p>\n
PSS, which receives $37.2 million appropriation under the continuing resolution, pays out $1.3 million for personnel every month.<\/p>\n
It currently employs a little over 1,000 staff and maintains 20 campuses CNMI-wide.<\/p>\n
The Finance Department gave PSS 1.9 million early this month to cover its urgent expenses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Finance Secretary Fermin Atalig said yesterday that payroll funds for the Public School System personnel would be made available this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}