NBI pays PLDT P3.9M for illegal calls

For the last 10 years the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) has refused to pay its unauthorized long distance telephone calls by its personnel. But yesterday, the NBI found itself entering into a compromise with the Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) as the company's disconnection notice finally caught up with the NBI's fruitless effort to identify the call culprits.

NBI director Federico Opinion Jr. met yesterday with lawyers of the PLDT to settle its P3.9 million worth of unpaid phone bills, the bulk of which are overseas calls, including those to Saudi Arabia.

"All those calls were charged to the bureau, some employees made personal calls and did not bother to pay for them," said Opinion.

Opinion has recently sacked his Electronics and Communication Division chief for failing to monitor the unauthorized calls. He was demoted to the position of an ordinary employee of the office.

The NBI phones used to have direct distance dialing functions until they were recently programmed to have passwords to access the long distance call functions.

The P3.9 million phone bill would have gone higher had not PLDT cut all NBI lines in the middle of last year. The paralysis of operation that the incident caused led to the discovery of the accumulated phone bills.

"We had no choice but to pay the amount. We could no longer trace the source of the calls. Certain people had in the past entered other employees' offices and used their phones. But what they did not know was that these calls were actually long distance," said an exasperated Opinion.

A representative of the Santiago and Santiago law office came to the office of Opinion yesterday to serve a notice that PLDT regulations require the filing of charges for unpaid bills. Opinion admitted requesting for a 20 percent condonation of the debt but this was rejected by PLDT.

However, according to the NBI chief, PLDT failed to deduct from its bill the P1.2 million the bureau has paid in the last few months making their debt only P2.7 million. Opinion said that he told the PLDT lawyer that they may be able to pay an additional P2.2 million from their remaining budget allocation for 1999 if the Department of Budget and Management will release the amount next week.

The P500,000 deficit, on the other hand, according to Opinion will be paid later. The money will come from the NBI's 2000 budget.