Spotty SSS files delay benefits due members

TEKA MUNA!: Social Security System president Romulo Neri is offering to the Commission on Elections the multipurpose ID cards that SSS has been sharing with three other agencies as voters’ identification cards.

Before embarking on this ambitious project, the SSS should first clean house and do something about its own unreliable record system that has deprived long-time members like me of retirement and other benefits.

My case is simple, but the geniuses running the SSS have made it complicated. They refuse to give me credit for my eight-year service as a reporter of the old Manila Times from 1964 until it was padlocked in 1972 upon the imposition of martial rule.

Refusing to recognize that eight-year segment of my employment, the SSS has drastically reduced my retirement and other benefits. Of course I have protested their faulty computation and refused to accept the reduced benefits offered to me.

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MISSING RECORDS: The excuse given for the slashing of my creditable service as a bona fide SSS member is that they have lost the records pertaining to my stint with the Manila Times. I have suggested to them to check the bodega where my papers may have been dumped.

The SSS is saying in effect that the venerable Manila Times, at that time the biggest English-language daily in Asia, was not remitting its social security contributions as well as the shares deducted from its hundreds of employees. That cannot be!

So now I am being made to suffer as a result of the SSS’s own neglect and its infidelity in the custody of service records of its members. It must locate or reconstruct its records.

The highly-paid fatheads at SSS continue to sit on my case, presumably waiting for me to die and thereby drop my claims.

*      *      * –Federico D. Pascual Jr. (The Philippine Star)