Back Salaries

To resolve the seeming conflict, the Court crafted two conditions before an employee may be entitled to back salaries: a) the employee must be found innocent of the charges and b) his suspension must be unjustified. The reasoning behind these conditions runs this way: although an employee is considered under preventive suspension during the pendency of a successful appeal, the law itself only authorizes preventive suspension for a fixed period; hence, his suspension beyond this fixed period is unjustified and must be compensated.

A careful reading of these cases would reveal that a strict observance of the second condition for an award of back salaries becomes important only if the employee is not totally innocent of any administrative infraction. As previously discussed, where the employee is completely exonerated of the administrative charge or acquitted in the criminal case arising from the same facts based on a finding of innocence, the second requirement becomes subsumed in the first. Otherwise, a determination of the act/s and offense/s actually committed and of the corresponding penalty imposed has to be made.

On the suspension/dismissal aspect, this second condition is met upon a showing that the separation from office is not warranted under the circumstances because the government employee gave no cause for suspension or dismissal. This squarely applies in cases where the government employee did not commit the offense charged, punishable by suspension or dismissal (total exoneration); or the government employee is found guilty of another offense for an act different from that for which he was charged (The Civil Service Commission Vs. Richard G. Cruz, G.R. No. 187858. August 9, 2011).