Toledo City Treasurer Ofelia Oliva said she would revamp her office because staff failed to deposit the balance of a P6 million payroll for teachers and employees last Friday.
An inventory is still being made to find out how much of the P6 million was stolen in Sunday’s still unsolved burglary of the treasurer’s office.
Oliva said that under office policy, the steel vault should be empty on Fridays on orders of Toledo City Mayor John Henry “Sonny” Osmeña, who recently issued a memo about it.
After the robbery was discovered Sunday night, police were asking why such a large cash amount was kept in the office over the weekend.
Oliva said that on Sept. 5, her staff didn’t deposit the cash in the bank.
She said the workers reasoned that they were busy that day.
“I’ve always told them that every single centavo must be deposited. They cannot go home without depositing the collection but they did not listen,” Oliva said in an ABS-CBN interview.
“But they will learn their lesson. We will have a revamp.”
Oliva said Toledo City Hall has a standing arrangement with a bank in the city for treasury staff to deposit cash even during weekends.
The P6 million payroll is the biggest loss in a string of five robberies of municipal and city hall treasurer’s offices in Cebu province in the past two weeks.
Oliva said it would be better if blue guards were posted in City Hall instead of in-house members of the Toledo Civil Security Unit (CSU).
Oliva, best known for her “dancing treasurers” strategy in Cebu City Hall to encourage taxpayers to pay their dues was eased out during the administration of Mayor Michael Rama despite his repeated requests to the Department of Finance to retain her.
She was about to be assigned to the Provincial Capitol but was sent to Toledo City allegedly on the request of Mayor Sonny Osmena.
LIE DETECTOR TEST
Three Toledo City Hall workers were released from custody after satisfactorily passing a lie detector test conducted by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) in Cebu City.
Toledo city police chief Senior Supt. Ricky Delilis said the three “persons of interest” were released based on results of the polygraph test that showed they were not fabricating their answers to key questions.
“It won’t stop us from investigating them. While waiting for the fingerprints taken from the vault by the Crime Scene Investigation (CSI), we are still going to monitor them,” said Delilis.
He said the three may later suddenly acquire possessions that are hard to explain with their salary level.
The three includes City Hall market collector Lynmar Caballero Formento who reported the theft to the Toledo City police Sunday evening.
The others are cashier Haydee Corbo, who allegedly let the collector borrow the key to the office, and the watchman on duty Mark Ian Mondo.
Formento went to the office Sunday to render overtime encoding official reciepts of his collection.
The vault was found opened with only P90,000 cash left, an amount that may have been overlooked in a tray with documents.
Cebu Gov. Hilario Davide III said he believes the recent robberies in government buildings of Toledo City, Sogod, Compostela, Carmen and Pinamungajan were “inside jobs”.
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