GSIS drops requirement for yearly status reports on members

By Ronnel W. Domingo
Philippine Daily Inquirer

MANILA, Philippines—The Government Service Insurance System no longer requires pensioners to renew their status as active GSIS members yearly amid efforts to make transactions less inconvenient.

“This initiative is part of the continuing efforts of the new Board to provide more responsive service to its members and pensioners,” said Robert G. Vergara, GSIS president and general manager.

“We don’t want to impose unnecessary hardship on our more than 300,000 old-age and survivorship pensioners,” Vergara said.

Related to this, the GSIS has signed a memorandum of agreement with the National Statistics Office to collaborate on keeping up to date the pension fund’s roster of pensioners and survivor-beneficiaries.

Under the MOA, the GSIS will provide the NSO with an initial list of all its old-age and survivorship pensioners living in the country—and following that, a monthly report—which will serve as database for NSO.

The NSO will then match the data with its own records and submit to the pension fund a report on who are already deceased or who have re-married, in the case of survivorship pensioners.

This will then be the basis of the GSIS in labeling or tagging the status of pensioner in its database.

However, some pensioners need to renew their active status during their birth month for one last time lest their pension will be discontinued.

These include those whose active status are suspended as of April 30 and those whose monthly pension are about to be suspended due to their failure to renew such status in February, March, or April.

Further, pensioners living abroad would still be required to renew their active status via video call or through the use of Skype, a web-based software that allows users to make telephone calls over the internet free of charge.