LOOKS like things are really looking up for the Social Security System now. And a 10% increase in retirement benefits of its members ordered by President Arroyo on the strength of its remarkable performance – less than a year after they received a similar increase last September – should erase any doubt about its financial stability.

From its once precarious position, tottering to a bankruptcy of sort some years back, it has recovered much lost ground, that is, based on the report of SSS president Corazon dela Paz and echoed by no less than President Arroyo during the System’s recent 50th anniversary celebration.

The figures speak of a much improved husbanding of the 27 million members’ contributions and what the President called “painful adjustments” enforced by the ‘new’ SSS leadership since 2001 when it went under one of its deepest crunches.

The increase, it is worth noting, was about 15 percent, from P196.3 billion in 2005 to P225 billion last year.

In all the current visions and plans of the SSS however, members are most wary of the phrases “widening its (SSS) market” and “getting into investment areas like microfinance.” And for quite understandable reasons; it is in these areas, after all, where much of the SSS fund problems of the late 90s are said to have begun, rocking its once solid social insurance foundation.
That was when its “sound” investments turned out not-too-sound after all.

Here’s hoping the laudatory messages for the SSS, well-deserved as these may be today, doesn’t lull its current helmsmen and administrators into ever playing loose with its members’ hard-earned money and that it has learned its lessons about taking the fast lane too much and too often.