The government gave away P100,000 worth of salary to an employee from the office of a Caloocan City lawmaker who turned out to be non-existent, a Commission on Audit (COA) report revealed on Wednesday.

The COA report identified the ghost employee as Benjamin Lagatic, an employee reporting to the office of the 1st District Rep. Oscar Malapitan of Caloocan but was enlisted in the payroll of the janitorial services budget of the Occupational Safety and Health Center (OSHC), Government Owned and Controlled Corporation (GOCC).

“The system was irregular because there was no appropriation for Lagatic’s salaries and he did not actually do any job at the OSHC. The payment to one of the contractual employees in the total amount of P108,286.98 from January to December 2011was irregular as the payment was made without approved funding,” the COA said.

“The services were not rendered for OSHC but for the Office of the Representative of the 1st District of Caloocan,” the COA added.

 Per COA, a contractual personnel can only be hired if the hiring was authorized and that there is an allocation for the wages of who will be hired.

In the case of Lagatic, he has never rendered services to the OSHC and the GOCC has not allotted
funding for his salary.

Lagatic was tasked to refund his salary worth more than 100,000 pesos.

COA also found another staff of Malapitan who received more than P100,000 worth of salary from the Employees’ Compensation Commission (ECC) from October 2010 to December 31, 2011, also from janitorial expenses.

Based on the janitorial expense report, the janitorial personnel perform the following tasks: prepared and installed streamers and advertising materials on all occasions of Caloocan City; painted the name of the congressman on his entire priority project such as schools, drainage systems, pathwalks, road construction and covered court and performed other duties that may be assigned from time to time.