House of Representatives. INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — Makabayan bloc lawmakers in the House will scrutinize pension system of military and uniformed personnel (MUP) during the upcoming budget deliberations, House Deputy Minority Leader France Castro said in a statement issued on Sunday.
“We will really scrutinize the MUP pension budget because, according to the DBM [Department of Budget and Management], it will reach P300 billion in the 2024 budget, and now the issue is that drug cops can still get their pension and the overpayment or underpayment of pension,” Castro, an ACT party-list representative who belongs to the bloc, said in Filipino.
Castro bared the plan after the Commission on Audit (COA) found discrepancies in the list of pensioners of the Armed Forces of the Philippines that resulted in P17.095 million in overpayment and P2.301 million in underpayment last year. The COA had ordered the AFP to reconcile and update its Pension Management Information System (PenMIS).
Citing from the COA report, Castro said COA called out the AFP for failing to tag and delete 1,026 delinquent pensioners from the pension payroll. Those pensioners delayed giving their status updates for several months to more than a year.
These resulted in the “continuous payment to unverified pensioners of monthly pension benefits totaling P159.420 million,” the report said.
“Even if the AFP management said that of the 1,026 pensioners cited by the auditors, 364 were already deleted from the pensioner payroll, millions of taxpayer’s funds are still being spent without being sure if they are indeed going to deserving pensioners,” Castro said.