State-run Social Security System on Friday said its undistributed collections stood at P817 million as of the end of the first quarter of 2017, a 28.2-percent drop from the P1.135 billion recorded at the end of 2016.
SSS president and Chief Executive Officer Emmanuel F. Dooc also clarified that the undistributed collections were member loan payments and not contribution payments of its members.
“There has been a substantial reduction of undistributed or unposted member loan payments from the recorded P1.8 billion in 2015 and P1.135 billion in 2016 to P817 million as of the end of March 2017,” Dooc said.
Earlier the Commission on Audit called the attention of SSS in its 2016 Annual Financial Reports on Government-Owned and Controlled Corporations for the P1.135 billion of undistributed collections under its “other current liability-member loans [OCL-ML].”
Dooc explained there are various reasons for the failure to post member loan collections in a member’s ledger, such as the failure of employers to submit or update the collection list, invalid entries of employees, and employers with unbalanced transactions.
“There are cases that the loan dates indicated by employers in the date granted portion of our SSS forms do not match the SSS records of an individual, thus unposted and unmatched payments occurred,” he added.
SSS said it has addressed the issue with regular reconciliation and clean-up of unpostables to resolve the errors. Dooc said posting of loan payments will soon be based on the Cash Collection System instead of the current manual encoding.
Social Security Commission Chairman Amado D. Valdez also said that the real-time posting of contributions and loan payments of members will be implemented by first quarter of 2018, which would lessen or fully wipe out the unposted collections.
“The Commission’s priority is to enhance the contribution collection process to improve the turnaround time for processing benefits and to eventually allow pre-approved salary loans for qualified members,” Valdez added.