City Hall workers return lost cash; owner traced

By Aileen P. Refuerzo

BAGUIO CITY – Assessment clerk Rosalina Lubina of the city assessor’s office had only one thing in mind after picking up the two rolls of bills she found lying on the City Hall lobby staircase around 2 p.m. last May 10 and that was to immediately get the P5,000 cash back to its owner.

           

Instead of walking back to her office, she went directly to the public information office where she asked for assistance for media announcements to locate the owner of the two bundles of cash – one with three P1,000 bills and the other with two P1,000 bills.  She left her find with the PIO for safekeeping in case the owner comes back for it.

            

The following week when no claimant turned up, Lubina, without revealing the details of her find, related the incident to her officemates just in case one of their clients happened to mention of any missing cash.  At the time when she chanced upon the cash, most of her co-workers were at the PFVR Gym for the annual City Hall mini-olympics and only a skeletal force was left to man their office and deal with a stream of clients on land transactions including settlement of land taxes.

An officemate, local operations officer Vivian  Estioco told Lubina she lost some cash that same day. The amount and the description of Estioco’s missing money matched that of Lubina’s find but Estioco was not sure where she may have dropped the money.

Another co-employee, administrative aide Marilou Regacho said a client mentioned of her missing cash on the same day and with the same amount and description and was suspecting that she dropped it on her way to the assessor’s office.

Estioco then suggested that they retrace the incident through the closed-circuit television (CCTV)facility of City Hall’s security service provider the Interlink Security Services as she herself was not comfortable in claiming the cash without concrete proof that it was hers.

Estioco herself facilitated the request to the Interlink through operations and CCTV in-charge Mark Padcayan who conducted a review of the tape.

Eventually, the CCTV tape showed that the money was dropped by Jacquelyn Rosado, Regacho’s client on the exact spot where Lubina found it.

Rosado said she was not aware her money came off her shallow pocket and realized only that it was missing when she was about to pay her tax dues.  She said she retraced her steps and went back twice to the stairway but did not find her cash.  She even kept her loss from her husband who was with her at that time afraid it might tick him off.

 She expressed gratitude to Lubina, Estioco and Regacho for their honesty and for exerting efforts to trace the owner of the cash.

“I was so glad my money was returned. It’s good that it was here that I lost it and ended up in good hands.  Otherwise, I might not have gotten it back,” Rosado told the three employees.

Lubina said that at the time she found the money, she was short of cash and even borrowed an amount from an officemate for her taxi fare to attend a prayer meeting but it did not occur to her to pocket the money as she knows that the owner will suffer from its loss. 

Lubina has been with the city government for 24 years.