BY AARON RECUENCO
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Police are now hunting down the wife of a police sergeant for getting more than P535,000 from the Philippine National Police (PNP) retirement system through an alleged anomalous pension claim.
PNP chief Gen. Archie Francisco Gamboa said he had already ordered the PNP Retirement and Benefit Administration Service (PRBS) to recover the entire amount that Lucila de Mesa had received as pension.
Gamboa earlier ordered the PRBS leadership to purge the list of pensioners of fake claimants after accounting disclosed that the PNP retirement system is losing multi-million pesos to false claimants.
Among the considered fake claimants are those who did not declare that their retired spouses have already died, the spouse of the deceased retired personnel have already remarried, and those whose children are no longer clarified to receive pension.
In the case of de Mesa, Gamboa said that she should have declared that her husband, a retired police sergeant, had already died in February last year.
“After nearly three decades as PNP pensioner, the monthly pension was supposed to stop in March 2019 but De Mesa’s wife Lucila failed to report her husband’s death,” said Gamboa.
The official said the wife of De Mesa had withdrawn a total of P535,355.93.
The PRBS has already filed a case against de Mesa before the Quezon City Prosecutor’s Office.
