HEAVIER CROSS: What social security management theories is President Noynoy Aquino applying in the private sector?

The President plans to increase workers’ contributions to the Social Security System to finance the upgrading of the measly benefits of its more than 29 million members.

That betrays a warped attitude even if he plans to extract “only” an additional 0.6 percent contribution before raising benefits, he claims, by 7 percent.

He scares us by painting a dark picture showing an SSS on the brink of bankruptcy. He says the system is saddled by a ballooning unfunded liability, which was estimated at P1.1-TRILLION in 2011!

Instead of telling us where the workers’ billions had gone and how to retrieve them, the President warned on the eve of Labor Day: “If we won’t do anything, we expect its unfunded liability to increase by 8 percent per year.”

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MORE BLOOD: The SSS and its reserve funds have been conceived to be fully secure until 2039. But the system is now faltering, because gross mismanagement through the years has disturbed its actuarial soundness.

To now ask member-workers to chip in some more from their meager earnings to nurse the system back to financial health is being cruel, a trait that this administration has displayed in its rough handling of its political enemies.

Are workers — who could be noisy and sometimes unruly when their families’ livelihood is threatened – now also looked upon as foes?

Instead of extracting more blood from them, the President should hunt down and prosecute the thieves who have been looting the SSS and robbing members and pensioners of their benefits.

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GRIEVANCE: If you ask if I have a grievance against the SSS, the answer is Yes.

Having worked hard for decades, at times holding key positions in mainstream media, I feel I do not deserve to be thrown a monthly pension of P4,143.40 a month by the SSS.

It is no consolation that I am in the distinguished company of more than a million pensioners being rewarded with less than P5,000 a month after having toiled hard and long.

I get angry when I see fellow retirees in the newspaper business who were my juniors and who had worked for fewer years but who are collecting bigger monthly SSS pensions.

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MISSING RECORD: One anomaly crying out for an explanation is why some SSS records of my employment history are missing. In their absence, how can I claim credit for valuable services rendered and premiums contributed?

The SSS has no record of my nearly a decade of employment and SSS membership as a staffer of the old Manila Times, where I was a reporter from 1964 until martial rule closed it in 1972.

Get a copy of the final issue of the Times that came off the press before soldiers swooped down on us that September dawn in 1972 and stopped the distribution the hot copies. The main banner story of that issue, now a collector’s item, was by-lined by a Federico Pascual.

It cannot be that the management of the Times – then Asia’s largest circulated English language daily — was not remitting my and my employer’s contributions. The SSS records of my colleagues in the same paper were intact, but not mine.

And then, if I was not a bona fide SSS member, how come I was able to get a housing loan from the system at that time?

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IMPOSTOR EXPOSED: The administrative state of the SSS is not only crazy. It is also criminal. And many people inside should be in jail instead.

I had wanted to clear up the mystery of my spotty SSS records quietly. It is only now that I am publicly talking about this.

I was consulting SSS through its proper personnel, some of them supposed friends in their PR (public relations) department. They tried to help, but it seems they were powerless before the entrenched crooks inside.

Their own sleuthing had unearthed the startling fact that somebody had used my name and record to apply for and secure benefits!

Only an insider or somebody with connections inside could do that. It seems that accounts that are not moving, in the sense that the members do not get loans often enough to give the semblance of activity, are vulnerable.

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SYNDICATE KILLED ME!: My SSS friends assured me that their anti-fraud-or-something unit was quietly working on the misuse of my name and records by an impostor.

They said they expected their investigators to soon corner and prosecute the perpetrators. “Perpetrators” is plural since a lone operator without key insider connection cannot do something as complicated as that.

Since I did not have time to play cops-and-robbers, I left it all to them. I thought everything was under control. It was under control all right – by the syndicate.

For lo and behold, they informed me later that when word got around that I was starting to ask questions, the syndicate closed the case by declaring me dead in SSS documentations and then got rid of the records!

To complete the act, I was informed, a woman posing as my supposed widow collected the benefits accruing to the estate of a deceased member (me)!

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INCLUSIVE GROWTH: Only a syndicate that has captured key sections of the SSS could have pulled something as complicated as my case.

I have no doubt that those criminals and their insider contacts are still entrenched at the SSS, growing richer as they victimize more unwary members.

Some SSS insiders share in the loot, in the spirit of “inclusive growth.”

After breaking the syndicates, assuming he has the will to do it, President Aquino may want to review the competence, performance and motivations of his SSS officials. That will be another story for another day.