“It happened last Monday. The Central Bank is picking up a new system IT and they applied it on the salaries. Unfortunately, the system integration did not go very well. There was an error. So, it threw out wrong numbers. They have blocked all accounts affected and they have started recalling funds from the accounts.”
“It’s not the entire civil service, it affected about 27 thousand accounts. I spoke to the Governor this morning (yesterday); the recalling is at an advanced progress. The first thing is we alert all banks to put pays on hold, to freeze all accounts, no movement of funds. I think all were done except for one bank, this morning (yesterday),” he told Kerr Fatou.
The minister expressed hope that the matter would come under control before tomorrow (today), when asked. “Yes, there should be,” he replied.
When further asked whether the problem is linked to the hacking of the Central Bank, he said: “No, this is a new system. Normally when you are launching a new system, you create what they called a ‘test environment. You would test it there to ensure that it’s consistent. But I don’t know what happened this time. You have to approach this with caution, but some of these programmers are over confident”.
He concluded: “We are aware [of it], and is under control, and we are doing the needful to ensure sanity prevails.”
