The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) is now in the process of removing the duplicate entries among the list of beneficiaries under the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) that resulted in the overpayment of Php7 million in the years 2020 and 2021.

Asst. Secretary Romel Lopez, who is also DSWD spokesperson, said that as of June 5, 2023, the 4Ps National Program Management Office (NPMO) and the National Household Targeting Office (NHTO) have completed the validation process for 316 out of the 370 households, which were the subject of the Commission on Audit (COA) 2022 report.

“Of the 316 households that have undergone the validation process, 186 households, or 58.68 percent were verified as duplicates. These will be immediately delisted from the 4Ps program while the excess cash grants to the duplicates will be recovered by DSWD through their active accounts that were retained,” the DSWD spokesperson explained.

The delisting process due to overpayment, according to Asec. Lopez, is in accordance with the DSWD Memorandum Circular No. 3, series of 2021 also known as the Omnibus Guidelines on the Recovery of Overpayments from Pantawid Pamilya Beneficiaries.

The DSWD spokesperson’s statement was in reply to the COA report on the overpayments to the 229 and 139 4Ps beneficiaries in 2020 and 2021, respectively, which included duplicated names.

“Validation tests conducted for payrolls amounting to Php3,891,300 in CY 2020 and

Php3,217,300 in CY 2021 revealed that 229 and 139 names (first name, middle name, and surname) of beneficiaries, respectively, appeared twice with different household ID numbers,” COA said in the DSWD’s annual audit report for 2022.

The list of beneficiaries for 4Ps, which is the government’s poverty alleviation program, is selected from the database of households living below the poverty line or the Listahanan, which is under the NHTO.

On the supposed discrepancies between the 4Ps beneficiaries and the Listahanan database as observed by COA, Asec. Lopez said there is an ongoing consolidation being conducted by the 4Ps NPMO and this will incorporate the results of the special assessment made by the NHTO.

“During the comparison of the 4Ps database and Listahanan 2, it was also observed that the Household ID numbers of those considered as poor in Listahanan 2 differed from the ID Numbers of 4Ps beneficiaries,” the COA report said.

The COA added, “In the selection of 4Ps beneficiaries from the Listahanan, the household ID numbers from the said list were not used as ID Numbers of 4Ps beneficiaries, which prevented immediate detection of duplicates in the 4Ps payroll.”

Asec. Lopez said the 4Ps NPMO will remove these duplicate entries within a reasonable time in accordance with the provisions of the DSWD MC No. 3, s. 2021. #