MANILA, Philippines — House Deputy Speaker Luis Raymund Villafuerte on Wednesday blasted the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) over alleged “blunders” that delayed the release of the cash subsidy for low-income Filipino families amid the coronavirus pandemic.
According to Villafuerte, DSWD committed two “bureaucratic blunders” which delayed the release of Emergency Subsidy Program (ESP) funds in accordance to the recently-signed Republic Act No. 11469 or the ‘Bayanihan to Heal as One Act’ which granted a subsidy of P5,000 to P8,000 to families affected by the pandemic.
First, Villafuerte said that DSWD should have immediately released the necessary forms to local government units so that the latter could enter into a Memoranda of Agreement (MOAs) with the department.
This should have been done as soon as President Rodrigo Duterte signed the ‘Bayanihan to Heal as One Act’, Villafuerte said.
Villafuerte explained that LGUs must first enter into MOAs with the DSWD to facilitate the release of ESP funds to them. The funds can only be downloaded to LGUs through their accredited banks only after the MOAs are signed by the local chief executives with the DSWD.
“Right now, not a single LGU has entered into an MOA with the DSWD because it has started to do only now what it should have accomplished last week yet, which was to send the requisite MOA documents to each and every LGU covered by the Bayanihan Act,” Villafuerte said in a statement.
The lawmaker also hit the requirement of the DSWD for barangay chairpersons to first certify and endorse a beneficiary before the cash transfers are released. Once the barangay chairpersons have endorsed the beneficiaries, that’s the time when municipal or city offices of the DSWD can validate the list.
This move, Villafuerte said, is “vulnerable to politicking and corruption.”
He explained that barangay officials may exclude qualified families only because the members of the family did not support the politician during the elections. Instead, Villafuerte said barangay officials could just include allies that are not qualified for the emergency subsidy.
This move could also lead to corruption especially with reports involving barangay officials selling quarantine passes that were supposedly free for residents authorized to pass checkpoints, Villafuerte said.
“It should be enough for the city and municipal DSWD offices to validate the list of ESP beneficiaries in every barangay to speed up the identification process and release of cash transfers to every target household,” he added.
Villafuerte likewise said that the DSWD has required that the social amelioration cards (SACs) given to beneficiaries be barcoded instead of simply requiring the LGUs to submit standard forms identifying the beneficiaries.
“This barcoding requirement presents its own set of a bureaucratic snag because this would mean a different system for each and every barangay covered by the ESP, instead of just requiring the submission of standard profiling forms that the barangays can accomplish quickly enough,” Villafuerte said.
“What happens to barangays without available barcode encoders or those without barcode devices? Where and how are barangays going to purchase such devices at this period of a month-long lockdown?” he added.
Slow progress
Villafuerte said “DSWD leadership appears bereft of any sense of urgency” in the release of the subsidy to the families.
“At the rate the DSWD is taking its own sweet time in implementing a cumbersome set of rules on how the emergency funds are to be downloaded to LGUs, it may probably take a month before the target beneficiaries are finally able to get the first tranche of their P5,000 to P8,000 cash transfers per household,” the lawmaker said.
“We cannot afford any delay in the release of emergency subsidy to the 18 million households who have lost their only means of livelihood following the imposition of ECQ (emergency community quarantine) and other personal-movement restrictions by the national government as well as LGUs across the country in a bid to slow the spread of the coronavirus,” he added.
Further, Villafuerte said: “Every single day of delay means another day of hunger for many of these target households.”
Section 4 (c) of Republic Act No. 11469 tackles the provision of an emergency subsidy to around 18 million low-income households in the country affected by the coronavirus pandemic.
The subsidy amounts from P5,000 to P8,000 a month for two months and is computed based on the “prevailing regional minimum wage rates.”
The DSWD has signed Joint Memorandum Circular No. 1 to “streamline and harmonize its various social amelioration programs to mitigate the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 health quarantine and the Enhanced Community Quarantine (ECQ) guidelines.”
Aside from DSWD, the memorandum was also signed by the Departments of the Interior and Local Government (DILG), of Budget and Management (DBM), of Trade and Industry (DTI), of Finance (DOF), of Labor (DOLE) and of Agriculture (DA).