Basically, "he was informed" is just a statement that in the past, someone informed him.
"He has been informed" talks about the present as a result of something that happened in the past. In other words, it means that right now he is informed because he was informed in the past.
So the first one is correct, because as Neil explained the action occurred at a single point in time.
Also, "is" should be "was".
If you want to make the second sentence grammatically correct, you'd have to change 'have' to 'had' ("Upon checking with Finance, he HAD been informed that the cheque was not ready"), although this means something completely different. It means that by the time he was checking with finance, he had already been informed about the cheque.