CEBU CITY – The Department of Social Welfare and Development Regional Field Office VII (DSWD-7) is currently fast tracking the payroll submission of the second tranche eligible families to the DSWD-Central Office for funding, while the payout of waitlisted families in the region for the first tranche of their emergency subsidy is almost completed.

According to DSWD-7 Information Officer Leah Quintana, the regional office has already done several steps for an organized, clear and complete distribution of the second tranche to all beneficiaries in Central Visayas.

Quintana said that the local government units (LGUs), as DSWD’s key partners here, have facilitated the encoding and the submission of the complete list of beneficiaries who received the first tranche including those who are waitlisted/ left-out families.

The list of beneficiaries had to undergo deduplication and cleaning to ensure that each family will only receive one assistance in various SAP programs such as from the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE), Social Security System (SSS), Department of Agriculture (DA) and other national government agencies, Quintana added.

She went on that the actual deduplication process shall be done in two levels. The first level comes from the regional and the second is done at the inter-regional/national deduplication level.

Both levels are currently done at the Field Office using the application developed by the Information and Communication Technology Management Service.  A certified list will be generated as basis for the payroll and funding purposes, Quintana bared.

For the second tranche, Quintana said that the subsidy will be given to the beneficiaries either through direct cash payout by a Special Disbursing Officer of DSWD or through digital payment by a Financial Service Provider (FSP) engaged by the department through a MOA with the Land Bank of the Philippines (LBP), the FSPs such as RCBC, Paymaya, Starpay, and Unionbank.  This partnership is under the technical assistance of the Banko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). 

For the beneficiaries who registered through the ReliefAgad App, they will receive notification on how to claim their subsidy based on their preferred account, Quintana noted that these modalities are improvement of the previous tranche to ensure a more efficient way for the beneficiaries to claim the subsidy.

According to Quintana that in Central Visayas, only Cebu Province’s and the cities of Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu can claim the second emergency subsidy amounting to P6,000 per qualified family beneficiary.

Payouts are being coordinated with the LGUs, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and Philippine National Police (PNP) to ensure safety and facilitate distribution.