DepEd seeks ‘understanding and patience’ over payment of service recognition incentive

Last December, President Rodrigo Duterte had signed Administrative Order No. 37 for the payment of Service Recognition Service (SRI) to government employees for the year 2020. An amount of not exceeding P10,000 shall be given to government employees not earlier that Dec. 21, 2020.

The Department of Education (DepEd) assured that the Service Recognition Incentive (SRI) remains a “reality for all” of its employees as concerned units continue to find ways to comply with the requirements needed before it is released.

For all DepEd family members inquiring about SRI that there are a lot of conditionalities that DepEd has to comply with before the processing, release and payment of the same is made to its employees,

DepEd Undersecretary Annalyn Sevilla said.

This statement is in reply to a couple of queries about the SRI from teachers and employees of the agency. She assured that they are not stopping from finding ways to make sure that the SRI will be a reality for the government employees. However, Sevilla said that as much as DepEd wanted to immediately process and release the SRI, there are procedures that the agency has to conform with.

One procedure includes pooling budget items from Maintenance and Other Operating Expenses (MOOE) and amount of savings in Personal Services (PS) which are to be submitted to the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) for modification and can become a source for SRI. 

Sevilla said that the DBM will have to evaluate and approve it and such procedure requires time to combine since funds will be coming from different schools, divisions, regions and central offices.

She added that the amount of SRI should also be uniform or same in rate for all DepEd employees. In order to accomplish that, she said that they need to do the right process of computations to determine how much is the possible uniform rate they can give to employees.

DepEd has been undertaking various steps to speed up the process,

she said.

Sevilla thanked the concerned employees for their commitment to public service and quality education for all students and has asked the employees for ‘understanding and patience’ as concerned units of DepEd are doing their best to fulfill the requirements for the processing and payment of SRI.