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Thursday, March 24, 2005
Retiree accuses GSIS of delaying benefits upgrade
TO GIVE better benefits for government retirees and senior citizens is something only pageant contestants or campaigning politicians would say. To German Bacaltos, however, it’s a battle cry.
Bacaltos, a government retiree, dragged Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) General Manager Winston Garcia into a criminal case in January this year for failure to implement a provision of law that raises benefits given to old retirees to the level enjoyed by those who recently left the service.
Also, Bacaltos recently impleaded the entire GSIS board of trustees in the case, accusing them of failing to tackle his July 30, 2004 formal verified “upgrading retirement benefit claim” he sent to the GSIS before filing the case.
Before their term
In his March 10 reply to the counter-affidavit that the GSIS Trustees filed against his complaint, Bacaltos said GSIS officials are just “too busy in wallowing in their cash and bonus benefits from the (GSIS’) multi-billion peso trust fund” to act on his request.
The GSIS Board of Trustees, based in the GSIS office in Manila, comprises of Bernardino Abes, Jesse Andres, Jocelyn Bolante, Raymundo Lapating, Esperanza Ocampo, Reylando Palmiery, Jesus Santos and Raul Serrano.
In their counter-affidavit, they said they did not act on the request because it was filed before they took their oath of office last Aug. 30.
“The respondents have forgotten that there is only one GSIS board of trustees and the same has not been dissolved by any authoritative law pursuant to the Constitution,” Bacaltos said.
The criminal complaint against Garcia and the GSIS trustees remains pending at the Office of the Cebu City Prosecutor.
It was assigned to Assistant City Prosecutor Daphne Degoma, who issued an order of inhibition that got the incident transferred to Assistant City Prosecutor Aida Sanchez.
In his original complaint, Bacaltos said the unacted retirement benefit claim would have been used as support for his bid for an adjustment in his retirement compensation.
The adjustment, he said, would remedy the “substantial disparity” between what he got and what other retirees are getting.
Not in effect
Bacaltos admitted that the new GSIS Act, which grants retirees 150 percent more than what they would have received under the old law, was not yet in effect when he left the government in 1995 after 36 years of service.
But he stressed this doesn’t mean that old retirees like him have no other recourse because RA 9257, the Expanded Senior Citizens Act, was signed into law in Feb. 26 of last year.
The provision, he narrated, mandates that the benefits of old retirees from the government and the private sectors would be “upgraded at par with the current scale enjoyed by those in actual service.”
The validity of the provision, he said, has also recently been upheld by a National Labor Relations Commission decision affirmed by the Supreme Court.
Nevertheless, the GSIS, through counter-affidavits that Garcia and the other officials submitted, declared that it has no intent to grant Bacaltos’ request for review. (KNR)
(March 24, 2005 issue)
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