The Quezon City Regional Trial Court ordered the imprisonment of a security agency owner of up to 20 years for non-remittance of the Social Security System (SSS) contributions of employees for over six years amounting to more than P675,000, including accrued penalties.
Judge Rosa M. Simon of QC-RTC said that Gomander S. Dimaporo, owner of the GDS Security Investigation Agency based in Sta. Cruz, Manila, “willfully and unlawfully” failed to remit a total of P179,924 in SSS contributions of employees for January 2004 to April 2010.
Finding Dimaporo “guilty beyond reasonable doubt,” the judge sentenced him “to suffer the indeterminate prison term of four years and two years of prision correccional, as minimum, to 20 years of reclusion temporal, as maximum,” in line with the Social Security Law and Indeterminate Sentence Law.
The court also ruled that Dimaporo should remit to the SSS the employees’ unpaid contributions with the corresponding monthly penalties that would continue to accrue until fully settled. Under the SSS charter, unpaid SSS contributions are charged a penalty of three percent per month.
Nancy D. Bagoyoro, Senior Account Analyst at SSS Welcome Rotonda Branch, discovered the company’s delinquent contributions while in the field to monitor employers’ SSS compliance as part of her duties as an account officer.
Based on Bagoyoro’s testimony, the company failed to settle its unpaid SSS contributions despite due notice given by the SSS through the letter of introduction, billing letter, and demand letter it sent to Dimaporo. The accused also repeatedly failed to show up during the scheduled court hearings.
“Despite the opportunities given by the private complainant, and the Court as well during the course of the proceedings, accused failed to appear and to offer controverting evidence to prove his innocence of the charge against him,” the judge said in her five-page decision.
SSS Chief Legal Counsel and Senior Vice President for Legal Services Division Atty. Voltaire P. Agas noted the declining amount of employer delinquency that amounted to P325 billion in 2008, of which P94 billion were unpaid principal and the rest were accrued penalties.
However, tighter monitoring of employers’ SSS compliance and intensified legal actions against erring companies helped bring down the amount of delinquency to P13.5 billion, including principal and penalties, as stated in the 2013 Commission on Audit report.
“Some sectors accuse the SSS of alleged ‘uncollected revenues’ of P325 billion that they insist would cover the proposed P2,000 pension increase. This is long-outdated data. Our total employer delinquency has gone down to about P13.5 billion. It’s not even one-fourth of the P56 billion needed to implement the P2,000 pension increase just for its first year,” Agas explained.
Latest SSS data show that a total of 15,448 cases against delinquent employers were filed by the state-run pension fund in court, at the Prosecutor’s Office and before Social Security Commission from 2010 to 2015. Court convictions against delinquent employers totaled 26 over the same period.
“About 55 percent or 7,964 of those charged settled their delinquencies through payment in full, by installment, or in kind after SSS’ filed a case against them. Collections from filing of cases alone have brought in over P1.17 billion from 2010 to 2015. This does not even include delinquency collections resulting from the issuance of demand letters by SSS lawyers,” Agas said.
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