A MAKATI social welfare official on Friday rejected the alleged “ghost senior citizen” scam narrated at a Senate sub-committee hearing by a Makati city official appointed by acting Mayor Romulo Peña.
Ryan F. Barcelo, head of the Makati Social Welfare Department, said the findings on the alleged ghost senior citizens in Makati were based on a flawed and questionable auditing procedure.
He dismissed the report of Arthur Cruto, officer-in-charge of the Makati Action Center, that more than 45 percent of the senior citizens listed in the Blu Card Program of the MSWD were “ghost senior citizens”.
He said the “auditing” by Cruto’s staff was faulty because he simply went to the house of a senior citizen, asked if the senior citizen was there, and if told the senior citizen was not around he simply put an “X” across the name of the person.
“The staff apparently did not bother to ask where the senior citizen was at the time, or if the said senior citizen had died,” Barcelo said.
“There is a difference between who left the house and who died. They did not investigate.”
Barcelo made his statement even as two lawyers said the Senate investigation on the corruption charges against Vice President Jejomar Binay was no longer being made for legislative purposes.
Former Integrated Bar of the Philippines national president Vicente Joyas and UP law professor Harry Roque Jr. said it was now necessary to ask the Supreme Court to stop the Senate Blue Ribbon subcommittee hearings on Binay’s alleged corruption.
“This Senate investigation is no longer in aid of legislation but in aid of election. The senators are fishing for evidence,” Joyas said.
“It has become an institutional hatchet machinery versus Binay, which demeans the oversight function of the Senate,” Roque said.
Binay’s camp on Friday said it was considering taking legal action against Senator Antonio Trillanes IV in connection with the ghost senior citizens issue.
“We will leave it to our lawyers,” Binay’s spokesman Joey Salgado said.
“Senator Trillanes raised the issue outside the Senate.”
Cruto said the Makati City government would be expanding his probe on the senior citizen issue.
He said the city government was losing about P367.5 million annually because of the ghost senior citizens who were receiving benefits from the city government.
Barcelo said there should have been a collateral interview of the senior citizens.
“They should have asked where the senior citizen was and not simply put an X beside the person’s name when they found out the person was not around. There are a number of reasons a person is not in his house at a certain time,” Barcelo said.
“The process itself is questionable. It was not clear if they conducted ‘collateral interview’ to the relatives of neighbors of the senior citizen. It was not clear if the “validation process’ was done without any doubt,” he said.
Barcelo said Cruto did not even provide documentary evidence to back up his claim that 45 percent of the senior citizens in Makati were ghosts.
Barcelo said the MSWD, which implements the city’s various senior citizens’ programs, was strictly following the procedures to validate reports that a senior citizen had moved to another address outside Makati or had died.
