Military group saves taxpayers money
By Jocelyn Uy
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 05:48:00 11/18/2008
Filed Under: Military, State Budget & Taxes, Government, Wages & Pensions
MANILA, Philippines—Amid the financial scandals set off by colleagues in the armed services, a group of naval officers with an eye for detail and a reputation for grit is prudently weeding out beneficiaries from the long list of military pensioners who no longer deserve to be there.
In the first three months of the year alone, the Armed Forces of the Philippines was able to save over P120 million in taxpayer money after some 4,100 beneficiaries were removed from the pension rolls.
At the same time, legitimate pensioners have started receiving their monthly payments on time, a sign the government may be slowly making a dent on its backlog of pension arrears totaling P14.5 billion since 2000.
All this is thanks to the Philippine Navy’s Capt. Cornelio de la Cruz Jr., Lt. Commander Brendo Casaclang, Commander Antonio Cantoria and Lt. Maynard Cabungcal, the core group from the AFP Finance Center that introduced the plan in November last year that is effectively cleansing the military pension rolls.
For the achievement, all four were accorded the Outstanding Achievement Medal by the Department of National Defense at Camp Aguinaldo during the DND’s 69th founding anniversary last week.
“A pension is taxpayer money so we have to do our part in making sure it ends up with the rightful beneficiaries. This is the hard-earned money of our soldiers too,” said De la Cruz, chief of the AFP Finance Center, in an interview with the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net).
The pensions range from P4,800 to more than P31,000 a month, depending on one’s rank.
Initially the project entailed poring long hours over lists of deceased soldiers buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani, cross-checking these with records of the Philippine Veterans Affairs Office and National Statistics Office, said De la Cruz.
The operation also required them to scrutinize marriage contracts and birth certificates to make sure pensioners’ widows and widowers had not remarried and children receiving a pension were under 21.
The group sometimes went the extra mile, setting off to pensioners’ homes to personally verify their eligibility.
Along the way, there were assurances the project was going to work.
Inspecting the voluminous death records on one occasion, they found out one beneficiary had long been dead but money continued to be deposited into his account until this grew to over P100,000.
The discovery allowed them to retrieve the money, said De la Cruz.
The group also temporarily shifted the mode of paying out the pensions from automated teller machines to checks which had to be personally claimed by the pensioners. This way the beneficiaries’ qualifications could be thoroughly checked.
Once a pensioner had claimed his check, he would receive the succeeding ones via ATM.
“When you put out the best carrots in town, all the rabbits will come to you, so we have to carefully validate them,” said De la Cruz.
A military person should be at least 56 years old and have rendered at least 10 years of service in order to receive a pension, said De la Cruz.
When a pensioner dies, the spouse continues to receive the pension until he or she remarries. Their children below 21 years of age are legitimate beneficiaries.
The records of 70 percent of the 106,000 military pensioners across the country have been validated, Casaclang said. The cleansing group has been traveling from one province to another since last year. Work now awaits them in northern Luzon, they said.
|
