City Hall employees show up to disprove Trillanes’ claims
By ARMANDO B. FENEQUITO JR.
Around 7,500 Davao City Government employees gathered at the City Hall on Saturday morning to disprove the claim of vice presidential bet Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV that the city has ghost employees.
City Administrator J. Melchor V.Quitain said the employees trooped to the City Hall to sign an attendance sheet to show to Trillanes that there were no ghost employees in the city.
Quitain said that most of the employees in the city are job orders.
The city employees voluntarily went to the City Hall on a Saturday after Trillanes filed a plunder complaint on Thursday against presidential bet Davao City Mayor Rodrigo Duterte before the Office of the Ombudsman for the alleged ghost employees under the city government.
Trillanes said in a report from www.abs-cbn.com , citing a Commission on Audit (COA) report ,there is no proof that 11,000 contractual employees hired by the city government in 2014 actually rendered services.
Quitain retorted to Trillanes’ claim saying the latter made a wrong research.
“Where did he get the records and what is the date and when that record was made available?” he said.
Quitain said that Trillanes should know that as the city progresses, there is always an increase on manpower demand.
“Ang mahirap kasi kay Trillanes, hindi natin alam kung saan nanggaling ang kanyang sinasabi (The hard thing with Trillanes, we do not know where he got his statements) and it is not even sure if he interpreted it correctly,” he said.
He said if Trillanes is using the same report in 2013, the city government already answered it.
“That is why there (are) no cases being filed against the mayor because there was no evidence to prove that there are ghost employees here in the city,” he said.
According to the COA report which was released, the city spent P708 million for the all the 14,499 employees in 2014, of whom 4,754 were from the City Mayor’s Office, 6,081 individuals were contractual, and 5,165 persons were job orders.
COA also noted that there were no clear contracts between the employees and the city government and there was no clear monitoring if the workers were reporting to their post every day.
Duterte already answered the COA report saying the city limits the number of regular position because hiring more would be too costly.
He said there are no garbage collectors in the regular position same with the
Special Civilian Active Auxiliary (SCAA) of Task Force Davao.
Duterte also said the also paid the sanitation workers and health workers.
He said the city even provided job order employees to national offices and facilities to augment their insufficient manpower.
