MANILA, Philippines--P21.3 billion, and counting. That's how much the Department of Education owes the Government Service Insurance System, according to top GSIS officials.

The amount represents premium contributions of the 500,000-plus teaching and non-teaching personnel of DepEd which the agency has reportedly failed to remit to GSIS during the past 11 years.

Citing ?submitted service records of DepEd personnel,? GSIS president and general manager Winston Garcia has told Education Secretary Jesli Lapus that the department's ?unpaid premium contributions? from July 1997 to December 2007 alone amounted to P139,283,446,554.

?Premium remittances received by the GSIS for the same period, however, totaled to only P131,885,410,563 (P128.22 billion and P3.66 billion, of which, came from DepEd and DepEd-Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, respectively).?

DepEd, therefore, ?still has unremitted premium contributions of P21,324,646,676 (consists of P7.39 billion in unpaid premiums plus interests of P13.9 billion),? Garcia said.

DepEd has disputed the claims, however.

The state pension fund has yet to release data covering DepEd's unpaid premium arrears from January 2008 onward.

In his letter to Lapus, Garcia urged DepEd to ?immediately settle its outstanding premium obligations.?

?Our earlier proposal for the payment of DepEd's unpaid contributions still stands. GSIS will credit all the premium accounts of DepEd personnel for the period July 1997 to December 2007 subject to the conditions that DepEd will acknowledge these unpaid premium contributions as its obligations, and it will ask Congress through the Department of Budget and Management for the corresponding budgetary appropriations.?

In a statement earlier, Garcia said the issue ?has long been a problem with the department and not just with the current DepEd administration.?

?In fairness to (Lapus), this is a problem that has been present way before his time. This is a deep-rooted problem that can be traced to his predecessors. Nobody paid any attention to it prior to 2005 and now it's the public school teachers who are paying the price,? he added.

To date, DepEd's arrears ?have remained unsettled,? said Robert Agustin, GSIS senior vice president for membership.

DepEd is ?still in the process of reconciling the statements of accounts we gave them,? Agustin said, stressing ?the ball is on the DepEd's court.?

?Our records will bear us out,? Agustin asserted. ?DepEd has reacted to only 44 percent of the collection data items we have presented to them.?

Saying ?offense is the best defense,? Lapus disputed GSIS officials' claims. He has assigned Education Undersecretary Antonio Inocentes to attend to the problem.

Referring to DepEd's P21.3 billion-plus bill from GSIS, Inocentes said they ?cannot acknowledge something which we feel is not correct.?

?We asked them to give us the basis. We want to see the figures first. Once we see we owe them, then we will write to DBM and Congress to appropriate funds in order to pay them,? Inocentes told the Inquirer. The DepEd-GSIS data reconciliation process is a ?work in progress,? he said.

Inocentes claimed ?there have been cases where GSIS failed to record payments we've made. Now, they're saying we owe them money.?

He explained ?the problem that we have now is not something that happened overnight. Instead, it's something that had happened over the past years during different administrations. These are things that we've inherited. We're trying to correct the problem.?

In 2007, DepEd paid over P1.7 billion in premium arrears to GSIS.

GSIS said that in 2005, it initiated and financed the updating of public school teachers' service records as it also assured it was attending to its obligations to pension fund members.

The militant Alliance of Concerned Teachers (ACT) assailed the GSIS for demanding payment from DepEd.

GSIS ?cannot even guarantee its posting of members' premium payments is complete, accurate and up-to-date. It cannot even guarantee that the service records of teachers in its database, which serves as the basis for computing premiums, are updated. It has not undergone a reconciliation of accounts with DepEd as directed by the budget department in 2004,? said ACT chair Antonio Tinio.

?Until it has done all these, any claims made by GSIS are merely provisional. Too bad, GSIS does not hesitate to automatically deduct these alleged premium arrears from the benefits of members, which is one of the core complaints of members,? Tinio said.

He claimed the pension fund's ?automatic deduction policy tramples on the right of members to due process and in fact violates Republic Act 8291, or the GSIS law itself.?

GSIS has been ?using its flawed database to generate claims of premiums-in- arrears against its members, which are then automatically deducted the moment they claim a benefit or take out a GSIA loan. In most cases, these so-called premiums in arrears are false, merely the result of their failure to post premium payments. Members are thus subjected to double deductions,? he added.

ACT also accused Garcia of passing on GSIS systems losses to members. It has called for the ouster of Garcia whom it blamed for the allegedly ?oppressive and unjust? GSIS policies.

Meanwhile, the over 200,000-strong Philippine Public School Teachers Association took GSIS to task for its IBM database problem which reports said had adversely affected the processing of members' claims and loans.

?It's always teachers who are at the short end of the stick. This has to stop,? PPSTA said.