2 Pangasinan State U execs suspended for oppressing teacher

DAGUPAN CITY — The Office of the Ombudsman has suspended for 9-months the president of the Pangasinan State University (PSU) and the school’s Campus Executive Director (CED) in Binmaley town for arbitrarily dismissing a faculty member and withholding his salary.

In a 10-page decision, the Ombudsman found PSU president Dexter Buted and PSU-Binmaley CED Marcelo Gutierrez Jr. guilty of oppression.

The decision was signed by Ombudsman Conchita Carpio-Morales on Nov. 17 and was received on Jan. 16 by the complainant, Ricardo Tapia, through official mail.

Buted and Gutierrez could not be immediately reached for comment.

In a complaint filed on April 27, 2016, Tapia, a PSU-Binmaley faculty member, accused Buted and Gutierrez of conduct prejudicial to the best interest of service, grave misconduct and oppression.

Tapia said Buted and Gutierrez had forced him to comply with his reassignment to the PSU campus in Urdaneta City despite a pending appeal he filed at the Civil Service Commission (CSC) regional office in San Fernando City, La Union province.

The CSC regional office denied Tapia’s appeal but the CSC central office eventually reversed it, saying Tapia’s reassignment amounted to constructive dismissal.

‘[Buted and Gutierrez] did not wait for the finality of [Tapia’s] appeal when they withdrew his teaching load for the semester, erased his name from the biometrics machine, withheld his salary and dropped him from the rolls,” the Ombudsman decision said.

Tapia used the visitors’ logbook and his daily time record to document his attendance at PSU-Binmaley.

In their joint counter-affidavit on Sept. 1, 2016, Buted and Gutierrez argued that Tapia’s reassignment was made “in the exigency of service” and with the approval of the PSU Board of Regents.

Of the eight PSU faculty members transferred to different campuses at that time, only Tapia defied the order, the two PSU officials said.

Buted and Gutierrez also said Tapia was dropped from the roll of employees for his absence without official leave after the CSC regional office dismissed his appeal on March 21, 2016.

But the Ombudsman decision concluded that Tapia “was not absent for more than 30 days” when Buted “arbitrarily dropped [Tapia] from the roll of PSU employees.” /cbb