The Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) is reminding its old-age and survivorship pensioners to renew their active status on their birth month to ensure the receipt of their monthly pension.
The System mandates all its pensioners to comply with this requirement, dubbed as the annual renewal of active status or ARAS, to avoid suspension of their pension.
To renew their active status, pensioners must bring their eCard Plus to the nearest GSIS servicing office or the nearest government establishment installed with a GSIS Wireless Automated Processing System kiosk or G-W@PS kiosk on their birth month.
Then, they must place their eCard Plus on the card reader of the kiosk. Afterwards, they must choose the “Annual Reporting” icon using the kiosk’s touch screen and then select any pre-registered finger. Finally, they must lightly scan their finger using the fingerprint scanner of the kiosk to complete the process which takes only a few seconds to accomplish.
“The ARAS requirement is a mechanism by which the pensioners themselves control their pension. Their continuous receipt of pension depends on their dutiful compliance with this requirement,” said GSIS President and General Manager Winston F. Garcia.
For the past decade, GSIS pensioners have remained the highest earning retirees among all pension funds in the country. The GSIS has continuously increased its pension since 2000, and has implemented another increase starting this January.
With this increase, the average monthly pension of GSIS pensioners has further increased to around P7,600, more than a hundred percent more than what other pension funds disburse.
Last December, the GSIS allotted P1.18 billion in Christmas cash gift to its pensioners, a growth of 27.6 percent from the P923 million budget allocated for the Christmas cash gift in 2007.
Meanwhile, for the first 10 months of 2008, the GSIS recorded an increase of 12 percent in the amount of claims and benefits it has disbursed to its pensioners to P28.6 billion from P25.5 billion during the same period of the previous year.
