Unsound proposal

When politi-cians of significant stature such as senators express their opinion on certain issues especially in the form of a privilege speech, it is expected that such opinion whether for or against must help weld a better option for any instrumentality of the government to pursue.

But when a senator calls for the abolition of sound policies pursued by an agency of the government simply because he dislikes the policies pursued, something is gravely wrong. And this is the situation Sen. Teofisto Guingona III has created for himself when he recently called for the abolition of the premium-base policy, automatic premium loan (APL) and the claims and loans interdependency policy (CLIP) of the state-owned Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) because he dislikes such policies.

Guingona also expressed displeasure over the alleged inability of the pension fund management to address the numerous concerns of the public school teachers who comprise 41 percent of the entire GSIS membership.

The question, however, is whether Guingona was right in his tirades against the GSIS. In this regard, Guingona failed to recognize the measures adopted by the GSIS in addressing the concerns of the teachers, most of which were the result of the collapse of the agency’s computer program that threw a monkey wrench on its database system. But this particular concern is a thing of the past now since the GSIS moved to HP-Oracle which not only normalized its operations but significantly increased its capacity to process transactions.

The first official act of the newly-named president and general manager of the GSIS, Roberto Vergara, was to enter into a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Education (DepEd) to update the service records of all teachers and non-teaching staff of the agency. The memorandum is meant to put to rest all issues pertaining to all concerns of the teachers with the GSIS.

The memorandum calls for the DepEd to submit to GSIS all the records of their personnel by December of this year. The DepEd also agreed to form a special body tasked of monitoring all efforts to complete the submission of all service records on the scheduled date.

Under the memorandum GSIS vowed to immediately post and download all submitted service records to its database. A special task force composed of officials coming from its Information Technology Services and Operations Groups will also be constituted to provide technical assistance to DepEd so it can comply with the deadline. After Dec. 15, the GSIS and DepEd will exert all efforts to speed up the validation and reconciliation process to arrive at an accurate figure of the latter’s obligation to the pension fund.

Unfortunately, this effort between the GSIS and the DepEd did not merit any mention in Guingona’s privilege speech. Expectedly, he also did not explain that the premium-base policy adopted by GSIS institutionalizes the fair thought that one should get the benefit based on what one has paid. He further skirted any discussion that every financial service institution either belonging to the public or private sectors all over the world adopt the APL and CLIP policies. These two policies require that before one can get another loan or receive a benefit one had to settle first all overdue loans.

But the GSIS assures Guingona that they are open to the idea of continuously doing a review of these and all their other existing policies with the end view of further improving their services to their clientele. GSIS apparently believes that all their policies are not etched in stones thus its openness to changing them if the needs of the time so requires.

It is indeed very perplexing for Guingona to call for the abolition of the cited GSIS policies simply because he did not like them. These policies are not even unconscionable but very sound ones aimed primarily at making the fund actuarially viable for several decades. Of course, I hate to imagine that Guingona was simply trying to get pogi points from the teachers even if it means his doing the unthinkable which is to call for the abolition of the agency’s sound policies. –Jesse E.L. Bacon II, Daily Tribune

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