Cotabato City—The Bangsamoro Government will soon compensate its employees who were first to be separated from service in October.
Breaking the good news Friday morning, Executive Secretary Abdulraof Macacua of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM) said the national government has already released about P500 million in gratuity funds to compensate the employees of the defunct ARMM, much to their delight.
Macacua said the employees and the transitional BARMM administration were thankful to President Rodrigo Duterte and to Budget Secretary Wendel Avisado for the prompt releases of the service separation funds.
More than 6,000 employees will be terminated from service, as they were deemed to have lost their positions under the new BARMM setup.
ARMM employees are being separated in three batches—on October 31, November 30, and on December 31.
Macacua said about P234 million from the national government is for paying the claims of the first batch of separated employees of the ARMM Office of the Regional Governor (ORG) and the region’s Department of Agrarian Reform (DAR-ARMM).
ORG includes workers of the Office of Media Affairs (MAD), insiders said. The fund is covered by Notice of Cash Allocation (NCA) No. D-19-0025121 from the Department of Budget and Management (DBM), Macacua added.
He said the DBM had also sent in a total amount of P268 million covered by NCA No. D-19-0024898 for employees first to have separated from the ARMM’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR).
Under the BARMM organizational set up, the DENR-ARMM is now Ministry of the Environment Natural Resources and Energy (MENRE), which Macacua heads concurrently.
Irene Fernandez Gonzales of ARMM Bureau of Public Information and Richard Sanlocan of Properties and Supplies Division of the ORG—both mid-level employees—said they were looking forward to their turn to receive the BARMM separation package before the year ends.
They both belong to the second batch of employees to leave the BARMM this year.
