SENATOR Richard Gordon griped over Malacanang’s veto of a Congress-approved bill granting benefits to the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG), lamenting that thumbing down the legislation that lawmakers worked to pass “wasted taxpayers’ money.”
In vetoing the bill, Malacanang had cited its provision granting OSG benefits “beyond the current compensation framework,” but Gordon lamented that the Palace also “wasted the time of lawmakers.”
“It was a waste of time, a waste of taxpayer’s money. We worked so hard for this bill. It was an administration bill,” the senator complained, adding that he “had no plans of filing such bill, but they lobbied for it. They vetoed themselves.”
President Duterte vetoed last week the enrolled OSG bill due to apprehension that provisions of the proposed measure granting benefits beyond the current compensation framework for other government offices may “prove to be too onerous,” as it will “create too much disparity and inequality” among Executive branch officials and employees.
“They asked for their salaries [to] be the same as others,” the senator said in a statement over the weekend. “We complied and we even debated it for them.”
Gordon, who chairs the Committee on Justice and Human Rights, said he agreed to sponsor the bill in the Senate to help ensure that the benefits received by the Solicitor General and the OSG lawyers would “be [on a] par with their counterparts” in the Judiciary, including the Department of Justice and the Office of the Ombudsman.
The senator recalled that during plenary deliberations on the OSG bill, he had asserted the “need to strengthen the OSG by adjusting the salaries and providing more benefits in order to attract and hire more lawyers.”