Newsbreak: Weeding out the ‘ghosts’ in the police roster

Exactly how many personnel does the Philippine National Police have at the moment? And how many of these personnel are actually assigned in the field? In the past, the police and the military refused to disclose exact numbers citing security reasons, a source from the budget department who is privy to the issue told Newsbreak. The situation, the source said, allowed both establishments to generate “savings" from the excess funds for personnel services which they allegedly used as slush funds. “They were able to get away with it because we (at the budget department) never insisted in getting the exact number. We just accepted whatever number the police and military would give us," the insider said. The exact headcount becomes crucial because of a new provision in the PNP budget that uses the number of personnel assigned per station as the basis for distributing funds for maintenance and other operating expenditures (MOOE). The special provision states that for every policeman assigned to a unit, the same unit should get P1,000 per month for MOOE. At present, the PNP has a little over 140,000 authorized positions. The PNP leadership claims that over 90 percent of its authorized positions are currently filled out. This number is fairly high, the budget department source told Newsbreak. In other agencies, the percentage of filled out positions against total available positions is much less. At the budget department for instance, only about 60 percent of positions are filled out, the source said. In the judiciary, the figure is about 60 to 73 percent of total available positions. Based on previous human resource related data submitted by the police, the budget department source estimates unfilled PNP plantilla positions stands at 20 percent. The budget department, the Department of the Interior and Local Government and the PNP are still reconciling personnel data at the moment. Camp Crame recently submitted a roster of 136,000 personnel—which means only 6,000 posts are still vacant. The list is now being compared against records of the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS), which indicates that about 16,000 positions are still vacant, according to the budget department insider. A simple “time lag" could account for the difference, interior and local government Secretary Jesse Robredo explains. In 2010, the PNP had about 132,000 authorized positions. Provisions for an additional P10,000 has been made in the new budget, he said. Still, the exercise has established one thing: contrary to its avowed policy that 85 percent of personnel should be assigned to the field, less than half of the current PNP employees are actually assigned to police stations. A recent submission by the PNP shows that only 58,985 personnel are currently assigned to some 1,779 police stations nationwide. That figure is about 43 percent of the 136,000 total positions that the police leadership claims to be filled-up. The next step, the budget department insider says, is to determine whether the concentration of personnel in certain offices is justified. In the process, the budget department insider says the exercise just might help extinguish the ‘ghosts’ from the police roster. – Newsbreak.ph in partnership with the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung