COA flags P17 million over payment in AFP pensions

MANILA, Philippines — The Commission on Audit (COA) has instructed the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) to reconcile and update its Pension Management Information System (PenMIS) as the audit team noted discrepancies in the list of pensioners, resulting in P17.095 million in overpayment and P2.301 million in underpayment last year.

“Discrepancies in the list of pensioners from the PenMIS resulted to overpayment and underpayment of pensioners and adversely affected the accuracy and reliability of payrolls,” the COA said in its 2022 annual audit report on the AFP General Headquarters (GHQ).

The COA said a review of the AFP Pensioners’ List revealed inconsistencies, particularly on the pension rank and pay grade of 212 pensioners.

COA said the monthly pensions of the 212 retirees were recomputed by state auditors using the pensioners’ payrolls obtained from the AFP Finance Center.

The recomputation disclosed that 169 pensioners were overpaid by a total of P17.095 million while 43 pensioners were underpaid by a total of P2.301 million.

The audit body said computed overpayments and underpayments was limited only to the amounts paid for 2022.

“The actual total may be higher considering some pensioners have been retired for several years,” the COA said.

The COA noted that the issue on overpayments and underpayments of pension benefits had already been raised by the audit team to the AFP management in previous annual audit reports.

The COA recommended to the AFP-GHQ to require the AFPPGMC to evaluate the discrepancies noted by the auditors.

In a reply, the AFP management said that its AFPPGMC has already launched an evaluation of the 212 pensioners.

Meanwhile, in the same audit report, the COA also called out the AFP over its failure to timely tag and delete from the Pension Payroll a total 1,026 delinquent pensioners who were remiss or delayed in giving updates on their status for several months to more than a year.

“These resulted in the continuous payment to unverified pensioners of monthly pension benefits totaling P159.420 million,” the COA said.

In a reply, the AFP management said that of the 1,026 pensioners cited by the auditors, 364 were already deleted from the pensioner payroll.

Meanwhile, the ACT Teachers party-list yesterday strongly opposed the proposal to use P120 billion in government savings for the MUP pension fund, saying that these savings should be used to increase the salary of teachers and nurses.

Instead, she said the government should fast track the MUP pension reforms and instead use such savings for the teachers and nurses.

“The savings should not be used for the military and police who are being ‘babied’ for a long time now. Their salaries have already been increased but they are still not paying anything for their pension,” ACT party-list Rep. France Castro said.

She pointed out that based on the national budget, the allocations for MUP pensions was P81.7 billion in 2018; P163.99 billion in 2022 and P139.51 in 2023.

On the other hand, the allocation for the pension of civilian government employees was P1.15 billion in 2017 and P1.6 billion in 2022. — Sheila Crisostomo