ILOILO City – Four hundred twenty senior citizens in this city are being asked to return the social pension they received from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD). They have been found ineligible for inclusion to DSWD’s Social Pension Program.
It was the City Social Welfare and Development Office (CSWDO) that identified these 420 senior citizens as qualified for the program.
Based on the Commission on Audit’s (COA) findings, there were 13,190 social pensioners in Iloilo City.
The 420 received pensions in 2018, for a total of P1,830,000, according to Regional Director Ma. Evelyn Macapobre in a letter to Mayor Jose Espinosa III and the CSWDO.
A qualified senior citizen is entitled to receive P500 pension each month. As directed by President Rodrigo Duterte, however, the distribution should be conducted every semester only. This means a pensioner will receive P3,000 every payout.
As previously practiced, the pension was released quarterly, thus each pensioner received P1,500 every three months.
The findings were contained in an Audit Observation Memorandum that COA sent to DSWD Region 6 in February.
In 2018 DSWD-6 announced it would be cleaning its list of social pension beneficiaries.
Senior citizens are not eligible for DSWD’s social pension if they are already receiving pension either from the Government Service Insurance System or Social Security System or even from private insurance companies, or they enjoy regular support from their families and relatives.
Only the following senior citizens (60 years old and above) are qualified to avail themselves of social pension from DSWD:
* frail, sickly or with disability
* with no regular income or support from family and relatives
* without pension from private or government institutions
Macapobre said only the qualified ones must receive the DSWD pension./PN
