Social Welfare Secretary Dinky Soliman. FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines – With a whopping P62-billion budget for the Conditional Cash Transfer in 2014, the Department Of Social Welfare and Development cleaned its program of dubious identities, and terminated employees looking to take a bite from the multi-billion peso fund.
In an interview with Inquirer Radio 990AM, DSWD Secretary Corazon Soliman said that they have a one-strike policy for the department’s corrupt employees and has updated the list of beneficiaries of the CCT.
“The one-strike policy is still on-going, we look at the employees especially on the issue of their integrity or if they are into politicking,” Soliman said. “We remove them from the service before we investigate.”
Soliman said that her department has terminated two employees and suspended three more, saying that the cases usually happen during the election season.
She added that the master list of the CCT program has been updated and duplicate entries have so far been removed, although she admitted that the system has its flaws.
“We are doing a revalidation, together with Land Bank, what this means is that the previous names are being added,” Soliman said.
The secretary said that people who were not previously entitled to receive benefits from the program were added as they were now, as Soliman puts it, in the “poor” category in the economic ladder.
She added that problems arose when people, especially the new beneficiaries, would not comply with the requirements and would usually give names that do not match their names in official documents and the complaints arise when the beneficiaries could not get the benefits.
Soliman, however, said that these cases were not a major problem since the people were legitimate beneficiaries.
The DSWD also improved the distribution of money, together with Land Bank, wherein beneficiaries can claim the money over the counter through money remittance centers.
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