Pension fund officials promise solution by December 2009

Gregoria Hembra, a 67 year-old retired elementary teacher, traveled back and forth to the Iloilo City office of the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) for six months from late 2007 to early 2008 in order to follow-up on her pension benefits.

During each visit to pension fund office, she had to walk up 4 flights of stairs after an hour’s worth of travel by commute. After each visit, however, she would go home with nothing.

Angry at the unnecessary hardships of his mother had to undergo, her son, Sherwin, decided to write a letter of complaint to the GSIS in May 2008.

And miraculously, less than a week after the complaint was submitted, Gregoria’s first pension was finally deposited in her E-card, the automated teller machine card that the GSIS uses to release pension to retirees.

Delayed pension

Sherwin is contemplating sending another letter to the GSIS after the release of his mother’s pension got delayed a number of times in recent months.

At first, he said, the release of the monthly pension got moved to the 8th day of every month. “That made me suspicious,” he said in a post he published on the Multiply site of ABS-CBN’s Boto Mo iPatrol Mo campaign.

“I told my mother that they might delay it again and move the release to the middle of the month, then afterwards to the end of the next month.”

Then last September 8, Sherwin said his prediction somehow came true. “My mother did not get her benefits. They said release was moved again to September 28. That is almost a month’s delay.”

“My question is, if they delay the release of the money to beneficiaries, how much profit will they get? Wouldn’t they delay it again to the end of September and again to the next month so that they will gain profits again?”

“Killing members”
Sherwin and his mother are not the only ones complaining over delays in the government pension fund manager’s delivery of services to its members. Online forum www.istorya.net has a string of posts specifically complaining about the GSIS e-card.

Further, at a hearing of the House committee on government enterprises and privatization on Wednesday, September 16, officials of government unions—whose members are also members of the GSIS—complained about delays in the release of pension benefits, as well as of accounts not being updated.

They also told of how members would receive notices from GSIS that they have not paid their loans even though they complied with monthly contributions and followed guidelines for loan payments.

Domingo Alidon, chairman of the education department’s National Employees Union said not only are retired members are not getting their claims on time, some also do not get the correct amounts, in effect getting less than they are supposed to receive.

“Pensioners need their money to buy medicine. “What would the old people do? Sit and die,” Alidon asked the GSIS officials present at the hearing.

Erroneous equation?
GSIS officials present at the hearing apologized for the errors and promised to the committee that they would provide a permanent solution to problems members complained about by December 2009.

They explained that the problems came about because they migrated members’ files from a manual system to a computerized system that crashed due to the volume of GSIS members. This was supposed to have been fixed last November 2008.

GSIS Finance Sector Executive Vice-President Omelita Tiangco acknowledged that GSIS members may have received wrongly credited or computed pensions.

She said that there have been delays in releasing pension for the month of September because they have discovered the problems in computation. They are currently re-computing all the pensioners’ supposed monthly claims.

She also said this is the reason why, since May 2009, retired government employees received their pension checks every eighth of the month instead of the first banking day of the month, she said.

She explained that, because the process of updating transactions has been changed, the computer read transactions manually updated by GSIS employees differently.

Now, the computer reads “loans minus pension amount” rather than the pension amount minus the loan, Tiangco said.  

The reason behind this is that the pension checks are processed only on the first week of the same month when the checks are supposed to be released, while loans were input in the computer systems a month before the checks, she said.

In a normal mathematical equation, because the unpaid loan was input first, it would be: “loan minus amount of pension” rather than “the amount of the pension minus the loan,” she said.

She said they are currently fixing their system and promised that a permanent solution to this problem will be in place by the end of the year.  After this, “all pensions would be paid properly,” Tiangco said.

Application for refund
The GSIS officials also said members who did not get their full benefits will be given refunds.

For the month of September, when they noticed the problem, GSIS pensioners do not have to apply to have their pensions recomputed, said GSIS IT consultant Helen Macasaet.

For previous months, however, since there are too many GSIS members, it would be difficult to reprocess and re-compute all transactions.

This means members will have to apply to get arrears in benefits refunded. “No application, no refund. It is needed,” Macasaet said.

House of Representatives Union Executive-Director Lilia Consul stressed that lowly employees of the lower House, such as janitors and gardeners, would find it hard to file for applications to refund.

Consul demanded that GSIS pay wrongly credited GSIS members and pensioners with interest after they resolve their internal computer problems because members have not received their benefits at proper times.

“You should return money that is rightfully ours,” Consul said gaining cheers from the audience.

But Macasaet said that it would be the human resources department of the lower house, or any other government agency, that should be responsible for filing such applications to GSIS.

New guidelines for claims
Macasaet said that they have “explicit measures to resolve back logs” due to the computer crash that happened in previous years and last March 13, as well as the problems of the pensioners.

She said that they have defined new guidelines and a schedule for employees to manually input records in the new database or the Claims and Pensions Administration System.

They also launched the Social System Actions. “This is for personnel staff and training to better serve GSIS members,” she said.

The last is their “technical solutions.” This includes the procurement of hardware and software. All hardware and software are procured but only some are implemented.

James Velasquez, President and General Manager of IBM Philippines, said that they already delivered last May 26 and fixed the said computer problems of GSIS but the problem is implementation.

Velasquez voiced that it was not fair that IBM, being the IT systems partner of GSIS, is blamed for operational setbacks of the government agency. “There is problem with quick implementation of systems,” he said.

Reactivation of membership
Another reason for not receiving claims is that members might not have reactivated their membership, Macasaet said.

This was because they were computerizing everything, Macasaet said.

Macasaet added that reactivation was requested by GSIS to its members when it started giving pension checks every eighth of the month and adapted a computerized system.

“There are only 1.36 million active, legitimate members,” Macasaet said. Before, when the system was still manual, they had 2.7 members.

“GSIS employees just granted loans before. Because they were lazy to check the millions of documents, they approved everything,” she said. But now, since there’s a computer, they are able to check which members are really paying and which pensioners reactivated their membership.

“If not for this, GSIS would lose a lot of money,” she said.

Suffering seniors
Asked if he is amenable to the GSIS requirement to make retirees apply for refunds, Sherwin said, “I am angry. Pensioners are obviously old. You should not expect them to line up and come back over and over again.”
 
“I don’t like seeing or knowing that my mother is suffering. She is old and deserves the fruits of her labor, she paid her monthly contributions on time she should receive her benefits on time,” he said.

Further, he said, “my mom has eye problems and high blood pressure.” The pension money, she receives monthly, he said, is important because she needs it to pay for medicines and for doctor’s appointments. - abs-cbnNEWS.com/ Newsbreak