Tulfo to fan out informers to pinpoint unqualified beneficiaries
Social Welfare Secretary Erwin Tulfo will tap informers to identify persons who should be delisted from the conditional cash transfer program, otherwise known as 4Ps, as they are not eligible to receive assistance or “ayuda.”
“It’s like estafa because you are defrauding the government,” Tulfo said in an interview on Saturday.
He said he plans to implement a reward system to encourage people to report unqualified 4Ps beneficiaries.
This, he said, is aligned with the directive of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. to clean up the list of beneficiaries of DSWD’s social assistance programs.
“That’s the order of President Marcos—to clean the DSWD’s list of beneficiaries,” he said.
Tulfo said thousands of Filipinos who are still waiting to be included in the 4Ps list would benefit from the purge.
He said he is also eyeing an amnesty system to allow unqualified 4Ps beneficiaries to surrender their accounts to the DSWD to avoid facing charges.
Earlier, Marcos also underscored the need to hasten the release of the national IDs as these will facilitate the efficient distribution of ayuda.
“Things like the giving of the ayuda, all of these things that we are trying for, going to digitize the bureaucracy…Having their national ID [ensures] a good database for the government,” the President said.
Socioeconomic Planning Secretary Arsenio Balisacan said the IDs, either in physical form or in electronic form, will be available “before the end of the year.”
Balisacan said 92 million Filipinos are eligible to receive the national IDs but only over 10 million cards have been delivered nationwide as of April 30, 2022.
“We are ramping up the implementation of our National ID system and also the digitalization in the government and with respect to the ID system, we believe that we can substantially reduce the leakage so that we can reach more people, more deserving people from the limited resources,” Balisacan said.