THE resignation of more than 30 immigration personnel because of unpaid overtime is causing long lines at the immigration counters of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport.
There, arriving and departing passengers must line up for more than an hour to get an immigration officer, a situation that can only make it more difficult to sell the Philippines as a good place to do business or as an attractive tourist destination.
Justice Secretary Vitaliano Aguirre II, who has supervision over the Bureau of Immigration, says this could undermine national security and wants to take palliative measures to keep 50 other immigration workers who have gone on leave to stay in their jobs.
The approach could bring short-term relief to thousands of travelers—but could also do more damage in the long run because it would perpetuate an opaque and inefficient system that is prone to corruption.
Before the 2017 national budget, the Bureau of Immigration was able to use funds collected from so-called express lane counters to pay overtime to immigration officers. These collections were also used to cover the salaries of casual and contractual personnel as well as the health insurance of the bureau employees. Under such a system, an immigration officer earning P14,000 a month could make as much as P48,000 with overtime.
But Budget Secretary Benjamin Diokno points out that under the law, a government employee’s overtime should not exceed 50 percent of his or her regular pay. This means the Bureau of Immigration’s bloated overtime system wasn’t just inefficient, it was also illegal.
“Under the law, your overtime pay cannot go over 50 percent of your regular pay,” Diokno says. “They were getting five times their regular pay. That’s the issue here.”
Moreover, because the express lane funds did not go through a budget process, their disbursement in past years was far from transparent.
The 2017 national budget closes these loopholes and bars the bureau’s use of express lane funds, which now go back to the National Treasury, as they should. Instead, the Budget Department has set aside more than P200 million for the bureau’s overtime requirements and has also created 936 new positions to address its manpower requirements. Overtime may now no longer be more than 50 percent of an employee’s regular pay.
“We want to replace the illegal, corrupt and opaque system with a system which is legal, clean and transparent,” Diokno says. “But they don’t want that. What they want is a system where nobody knows who is getting overtime pay.”
Viewed from this perspective, the answer to the current problem at the airport isn’t to keep existing immigration officers on the job by paying them bloated overtime from express lane funds, particularly since their mass leave can be seen as a form of intimidation if not blackmail.
The key is to find new workers who are willing to follow the rules, and a management at the Bureau of Immigration that is just as committed to enforcing them.
If the existing immigration personnel no longer want their jobs, so be it; there are plenty of qualified people who do.