No payment to dead pensioners – PVAO

MANILA, Philippines — The Philippine Veterans Affairs Office (PVAO) yesterday refuted reports it has been paying dead pensioners.

Defense Undersecretary and PVAO administrator Ernesto Carolina said they have established safety nets to prevent such pension payoffs as pointed out by the Commission on Audit (COA) in a recent audit report.

Carolina said the fund in question is intact in the PVAO’s bank account. Some individual accounts have been frozen due to the death of the recipient.

“There’s no truth that dead pensioners were paid. The truth is, as reported, there were over remittances in the payroll because it is unavoidable… because at the time we remitted the funds there were veterans who had died, some of them died while the payments were in transit,” Carolina said.

This payroll stays in the PVAO bank account. If the funds are remitted to the pensioners’ bank account, it needs the biometrics of an individual pensioner for the funds to be withdrawn.

“Those over-remittances were recovered. There are some delays but we have recovered the funds. So we assure the public, we assure our veterans, that the past phenomenon that dead veterans received pensions is no longer happening now,” Carolina said.

COA said the recovered funds are still deposited to the PVAO’s serving banks instead of remitting it back to the Bureau of the Treasury (BTr), which is in violation of Republic Act 10964 or the General Appropriations Act (GAA) of 2018.

The COA has directed PVAO to determine and hold liable its officials responsible for the payment of a total of P70.25 million in monthly pensions to deceased beneficiaries. 

Carolina disputed COA’s observation, saying the Department of Budget and Management is the final authority on the recovered funds.

The funds are being added to the PVAO budget to bankroll the increase in monthly pension of the surviving veterans.

So far, out of the reported P70-million pension payment to dead pensioners, 60 percent of this was already recovered by PVAO. The recovery of the remaining 40 percent is still in progress, Carolina said.

He said PVAO cannot just automatically cancel pension payments unless there are valid documents showing that the veteran recipients are already dead.

Carolina cited cases of some veterans who lived abroad for several years and then returned to the country.

The Philippine Postal Authority (PPA) and the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) provide the documents to PVAO proving that the pensioners are deceased.

“It is very difficult for surviving families to encash pensions of dead veterans because cannot be buried without the death certificates which the PSA automatically furnished the PVAO,” Carolina said.

He added that in the case of PPA, the postman is required to pay a monthly visit to pensioners and the findings are also forwarded to the PVAO.