Obscene

Philippine Daily Inquirer

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THE NEWS that Malacañang has slashed the subsidies of government-owned and -controlled corporations in the proposed P1.645-trillion national budget for 2011 is the first concrete response by the government to the problem of runaway salaries of GOCC officials.

From P32.3 billion this year, the proposed subsidy has been cut to P23.3 billion. The difference—as much as P16.016 billion—is a huge amount, and represents a welcome dose of fiscal sanity in a system that looks very much like institutional highway robbery.

It’s a good initial step, but Malacañang must not stop there. The revelation that executives and employees of these GOCCs are the highest-paid workers in the government payroll prompts the question: What do they need the government subsidies for?

The Metropolitan Waterworks and Sewerage System, for instance, must have, in Sen. Franklin Drilon’s wry formulation, run out of letters of the alphabet to call its laundry list of bonuses. The perks come with the most commonplace names, but the amounts they guarantee, and the fact that they repeat themselves in ever more desperate-sounding variations, ensures the generosity of the largesse. Just for the holiday season, the MWSS dispenses three kinds of bonuses to its board of trustees: the Traditional Corporate Christmas Package (TCCP), Traditional Christmas Bonus (TCB), and Additional Christmas Bonus (ACB).

 Pray tell, how are they different from each other? There are also bonuses for such milestone events as the “anniversary of the privatization of MWSS,” “family week celebration” (separate from the “family day” bonus) and “government corp/employees week,” on top of the “collective negotiation agreement incentive,” “rate rebasing incentive,” “educational assistance” and “additional educational assistance,” among other things.

Since the MWSS and other firms like it are swimming in so much money that they have to employ absurd nomenclature to justify giving the cash away, why do they still receive subsidies from state coffers? Ah, their executives will tell you: because their charters say so. GOCC charters not only grant these companies fiscal and administrative autonomy, they also require the government to provide automatic allocations for them in the national budget.

And there is the gaping loophole Congress and Malacañang must plug if they are serious about reining in these outrageous emoluments.

The Department of Finance has also announced it is studying the creation of a centralized body that will streamline GOCC operations. Any office established for such purpose will have its work cut out for it. Its first task is to find out whether maintaining all these corporations at crippling government expense is still worth it. Part of the 158 or so GOCCs “are no longer operating,” Finance Undersecretary Jeremias N. Paul Jr. said. Why hasn’t anyone looked into abolishing such costly deadwood?

Congress, too, must revisit the charters of these organizations, and root out esoteric provisions that, over the years, have only managed to shield these companies from the glare of public accountability and transparency. The defense that such charters exempt GOCCs from the ambit of regular governmental oversight has allowed these corporations to make short shrift of the normal rules on rational pay and auditing practices, directly giving rise to the problem of astronomical bonuses.

A memorandum order issued by former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in 2001, for example, explicitly barred any GOCC executive from receiving salaries twice the regular pay of Cabinet secretaries (about P69,000 monthly, gross). But documents submitted to the Senate show that board members of the Government Service and Insurance System were paid as much as P6 million each annually, or P500,000 every month. Their work? Attending two board meetings a month.

Officials of the Social Security System were even more handsomely rewarded for their efforts. Four of them reportedly raked in millions as designated board members of Philex Mining Corp., where the SSS holds some P14.3 billion in investments.

What happened to the GMA memorandum? Ignored just like that?

This is unacceptable—a completely anarchical state of affairs that, in time, would drive the country to penury. Obscene is the word, and that describes both the staggering amounts that have changed hands, and the people who have had no compunction receiving them.

Published in Philippine Daily Inquirer August 28, 2010.