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Friday, March 29, 2024

Those were the days

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August used to be a month when the entire Social Security System would be agog preparing to celebrate its September 1 anniversary.

SSS officials would have a long list of things to announce on that day—increase in pension, sickness, maternity and funeral expense benefits, liberalization of loan requirements, and innovations in service delivery. They would also have condonation of contribution and loan delinquency penalties, new types of calamity loans, and creative investment strategies.

A high-ranking public official would be invited to formally announce them during the main anniversary program. But if SSS officials knew that these announcements would be significant, they would have patiently lobbied Malacañang months earlier to have the President deliver the main anniversary message.

The most anticipated would be the pension increase, which pensioners wanted to hear being announced as if it could still be increased a notch higher in the last minute.

The program would last for an hour, thus, a separate one would be held to recognize outstanding employers and banks for their contributions in the success of SSS projects in the previous year.

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The SSS employees would have their own program late in the afternoon, where they’d perform the entertainment numbers themselves. But usually, celebrities would also come to spice up the celebration.

To advertise its achievements, SSS officials would call a press conference and publish a 4-page supplement in three major newspapers.

Indeed, SSS anniversary celebrations used to be fiesta time.

But in August this year, SSS employees and officials had barely prepared to celebrate their forthcoming 59th anniversary next week.

First of all, their president and board members have expired terms of office since June 30. They are now occupying their positions on a mere hold-over capacity. After six years in office, they have become lame ducks.

This time, they cannot release to themselves any performance-based bonus for 2015, which amounted to almost a million pesos for each in the past. The Governance Commission for GOCCs has left pending the approval of its bonus.

The agency’s service delivery of its ID card releasing and pension processing has been unsatisfactory for some time now, and no matter how often its officials trumpeted their achievements in non-essential undertakings, complaints have kept pouring in large numbers. Thus, many are no longer surprised that SSS is consistently receiving the highest number of complaints from among callers in the newly-opened hotline 8888 for public complaints of President Duterte.

SSS has again made the public worry about its financial position when news broke out that it had lost millions of contribution records due to a computer glitch. Some even thought that it had lost not only records, but contributions as well.

SSS officials won’t admit that they had lost these records. According to them, they could manually recover them, anyway, from the agency’s antiquated microfilm record system.

Thus, they had been quietly re-encoding for years now these missing contributions in the five-year period 1985-1989, and re-computing pensions.

The maximum adjustment is five years x 2 percent or 10 percent of the average monthly salary credit and would thus amount to P1,000 per month for a P10,000 AMSC.

How much have these adjustments amounted to? Three of my senior citizen friends have received their accumulated adjustments of more than P100,000 each. So far, 154,357 pensioners had already received their accumulated adjustments, and they amounted to P7.2 billion or nearly P50,000 each.

The reencoding job must be so massive that SSS officials could only commit its completion in June 2017.

SSS officials must now disclose the value of these recently- discovered financial obligations. Otherwise, they must be compelled to make the disclosure by virtue of President Duterte’s recently-issued Freedom of Information executive order.

Are these financial obligations the real reason why SSS officials are stubbornly refusing to grant the P2,000 pension increase?

They say that granting it would bankrupt the institution.

Many do not believe them.

President Duterte even promised during the campaign period that he’d grant it as soon as he got elected president. So far, however, he has not reiterated this promise nor initiated anything about its grant.

Perhaps, he is just waiting to sign into law any of the bills granting the increase that Senators Cynthia Villar and Antonio Trillanes and two dozen congressmen led by Rep. Ruffy Biazon have all filed in the current 17th Congress.

They are almost the carbon copy of each other. Sadly, however, none has hinted about how it would be funded.

Despite the gloomy realities that SSS is facing on its 59th anniversary, 2 million pensioners still see a glimmer of hope that they would receive that P2,000 pension increase. After all, this would be their first SSS anniversary under President Duterte. Even half or a quarter of P2,000 would be enough to bring tears of joy and relief to them.

Instead, they would likely hear from defensive SSS officials a pedagogical lecture on why the increase would bankrupt it.

Yet, if only they were more dynamic and caring, they would seize the occasion to propose their solution on how to reform our now-Jurassic pension system.

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