MANILA, Philippines - The camp of Vice President Jejomar Binay denied yesterday Sen. Antonio Trillanes’ latest allegation that there are “ghost” senior citizens in Makati City.
Joey Salgado, Binay’s spokesman for media affairs, said they follow a strict process in the senior citizen program.
The audit was conducted for the years 2013 to 2015 or during the term of the Vice President’s son, suspended Makati Mayor Jejomar Erwin Binay Jr.
The younger Binay, along with 14 other Makati officials, was ordered suspended by the ombudsman for involvement in the alleged overpricing in the construction of the Makati Science High School.
Salgado, former head of Makati City’s public information office, said the senior citizens of Makati personally apply and submit documents before they are enrolled. They go through verification and benefits are received personally, he added.
Salgado said the city social welfare department has a system to delist deceased beneficiaries.
He also stressed the program is subject to regular scrutiny by the Commission on Audit, and “there has never been any adverse findings.”
Ghost findings
At the resumption of the Senate Blue Ribbon subcommittee hearing on alleged anomalies against Binay yesterday, Arthur Cruto, head of the Makati Action Center, said based on initial findings of their audit, some 31,280 names on the official list of 68,187 senior citizens in the city were not residents and cannot be found in the addresses given.
Cruto said the city government of Makati loses an estimated P367.5 million every year due to its payouts to allegedly “ghost” or nonexistent senior citizens of the city.
According to Cruto, the city has around 68,000 senior citizens in the roster of the Makati Social Welfare Department (MSWD), close to half of whom could not be located.
Cruto, a former barangay official appointed to head the Makati Action Center, was tasked to conduct an audit of the senior citizen program of the city, which was dubbed as the Blue Card program.
The initial audit was conducted on the two smallest barangays of the city, Pinagkaisahan and Kasilawan, the results of which were used by Cruto as the basis of how the program was being implemented during the tenure of suspended Mayor Junjun Binay.
Cruto said house-to-house interviews were conducted to check the existence of the senior citizens in the list of the MSWD.
The same list was also compared to the voter’s list of the Commission on Elections and the list of dead senior citizens in the civil registry.
In Barangay Kasilawan, Cruto pointed out that only 660 out of 1,095 senior citizens were located and the rest in the MSWD list could not be found.
For Barangay Pinagkaisahan, only 449 out of 938 senior citizens were located.
During the audit of Barangay Pinagkaisahan, Cruto said he noticed there were 25 senior citizens listed at the same address.
Being a resident of the barangay, Cruto said he personally checked the house and saw only three of the 25 were there.
The audit also showed there were dead senior citizens in the list, some who died in 2013 and were still receiving benefits from the city government.
He presented a number of death certificates in his slideshow presentation yesterday to corroborate his claims.
Cruto stressed this was just an initial audit and that his team is in the process of going over all of the barangays in the city.
Based on what he saw in the initial audit, Cruto said 31,280 of the 68,000 or 46 percent of the senior citizens in Makati City were questionable.
Under the Blue Card program, Cruto explained each senior citizen receives a cash gift of P3,000; a birthday cake worth P300; special groceries for Christmas worth P1,500; free movies amounting to around P350.
The total adds up to P6,650, but according to Cruto, these were just averages and that the total average given to each senior citizen would be somewhere around P11,750 annually.
At that rate, Cruto said the city government spends a total of P799 million for senior citizens’ benefits every year.
Since there were an estimated 31,280 senior citizens that could not be accounted for, Cruto said the loss of the city from the program would amount to P367.5 million annually.
Because the audit covered only two barangays so far, Cruto said the estimates he presented were merely based on the trend and not actual data collected from all the barangays.
Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV asked for the issuance of subpoenas to the officials of Makati City who were involved in the program so they could explain the discrepancies before the committee in its next hearing on Aug. 26.
“All these years Vice President Binay has been fooling the people by saying that he is helping the poor,” Trillanes said.
Senate Majority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano said that even though there was no clear explanation where the alleged funds for seniors went, it was hard to believe the people who ran the city did not know this was going on.
“Our question is, was there a pattern and were the Binays involved? Anomalies can happen under the noses of leaders. There can be anomalies that are treated as leakages. But the ones that involve a conspiracy among the syndicates are different,” Cayetano said.
“It now appears that there are syndicates in every project. In construction, senior citizens and even land there are syndicates. These hearings will determine whether another term or term in Malacañang or a jail term would be given to the Vice President,” he added. – With Marvin Sy, Mike Frialde