Poe urged to look deeper into discounts for seniors

Senior citizens are surely gratified by Senator Grace Poe’s filing of a resolution seeking a Senate inquiry on violations of the rights of senior citizens under Republic Act No. 9994 or the Senior Citizens Law.

We senior citizens have been looking for someone in Congress to take the cudgels for us because there are hundreds of establishments that wittingly or unwittingly violate the provisions of the law or whose personnel are not properly oriented to comply with its rules and regulations.

The law has been in existence since 1992 with amendments made in 2010, and it took a neophyte senator in this era to take a serious effort to look into actual incidents of its repeated and frequent violations.

While Senator Poe did not mention it in her resolution, most of the cases on which her resolution was founded were those I filed against certain establishments that did not honor other government-issued identification cards as proof of the age of a senior citizen. She likewise cited the case of a hotel that refused to grant me the 20-percent discount for senior citizens on the ground that the item was covered by its sales promotion.

Only recently, the Department of Trade and Industry ruled that the 20-percent discount to which a senior citizen is entitled is over and above the promo price if the “promo” is not approved by the DTI.

We can assure Senator Poe that the entire gallery of the Senate session hall or any Senate conference room would be filled to capacity by senior citizens once the Senate inquiry is conducted.

To give more teeth to the law, Senator Poe should call upon the mayors or governors to strictly apply Section 7 of RA 9994. The law gives them the power to cancel or revoke the business permits of establishments, after due notice and hearing, once a complaint for violation of the law is filed against them.

I am sure, just one such revocation of a business permit would serve as a wake-up call to all of them that the government is serious in the proper implementation of the law.

Meantime, there is no violation committed by grocery stores giving a flat rate of P65 for grocery items purchased by a senior citizen because it is equivalent to 5 percent of P1,300 weekly purchase by a senior citizen, which was set by the DTI and the Department of Agriculture under DTI-DA Joint Administrative Order No. 10-02, Series of 2010, pursuant to Section 4, RA 9994 and Section 4(j) of its implementing rules and regulations.

What should be further looked into by Senator Poe is the provision of RA 9994 which grants senior citizens a 5-percent discount on electric and water consumption but limits its application to senior citizens whose electric consumption does not exceed 100 kilowatt hours or whose water consumption does not exceed 30 cubic meters. This provision should be amended to read that the senior citizen should be entitled to 5-percent discount on the first 100 kWh or the first 30 cu m of electric or water consumption, respectively.

—ROMULO B. MACALINTAL,

advocate for senior citizens’ rights,

Las Piñas City