Death benefits of the seafarer do not form part of his estate that must be settled among his legal heirs.
Thus declared the Supreme Court in the recent case of Macalinao vs. Macalinao (GR 250613 April 3. 2024) in relation to the death benefits being claimed by two spouses of a deceased seafarer.
The seafarer and the first wife were married in 1981 and were blessed with one child. However, they ultimately separated four years later. With his marriage to the first wife subsisting, the seafarer entered into a marriage with the second wife in 1990, after which they lived together as husband and wife for 25 years with two children, until his death in 2015.
Under the POEA Standard Employment Contract (POEA SEC), in case of work-related death of the seafarer, during the term of his contract, the employer shall pay his beneficiaries the Philippine currency equivalent to the amount of $50,000 and an additional amount of $7,000 to each child under the age of 21 but not exceeding four children, at the exchange rate prevailing during the time of payment.
The first wife initially filed before the Regional Trial Court (RTC) a petition for the declaration of nullity of the marriage between the seafarer and the second wife. It was later amended to Petition for the Settlement of Estate, with the issue of the declaration of nullity of the marriage considered a secondary issue.
The Court said that it must first qualify what said death benefits are with respect to their nature and, consequently, their distribution.
The Court stressed that the provision refers to a contractual death benefit borne of the employment contract between the principal and seafarer, the proceeds of which are directly payable to his beneficiaries, who are, in turn, determined in accordance with rules of compulsory and intestate succession.
The Court cited Articles 776 and 781 of the New Civil Code, which provide what the inheritance of the decedent consists of.
Article 776 states: “The inheritance includes all the property, rights and obligations of a person which are not extinguished by his death.”
Article 781 states: “The inheritance of a person includes not only the property and the transmissible rights and obligations existing at the time of his death, but also those which have accrued thereto since the opening of the succession.”
Inasmuch as the benefits due the decedent’s beneficiaries arise only upon the decedent’s demise, the Court said that they cannot be considered as property, rights and obligations of the decedent already existing “at the time of his death” prior to his demise.
The death benefits that the heirs of a deceased seafarer are entitled to shall be paid in accordance with the rules of succession, in that they may only be paid to those who are considered as the seafarer’s legal heirs in the proportion as provided under said rules.
This reference to the rules of succession, however, does not extend to say that the death benefits are part and parcel of the seafarer’s hereditary estate or inheritance.
While the subject death benefits do not form part of the seafarer’s estate, they nevertheless flow and are paid to his qualified beneficiaries as “death proceeds or compensation,” with the reference to the rules on succession only for purposes of determining who the qualified beneficiaries may be, and their entitled apportionments thereto.
The proceeding before the RTC was not a settlement proceeding as there was no estate to settle let alone speak of. Instead, the proceeding was simply an action for a claim over a contractual death benefit, the parameters for distribution of which are prescribed by the POEA rules to be consistent with the rules on succession.
The fact that death compensations and other benefits do not form part of a decedent’s estate for purposes of computing the estate tax is consistent with the idea that they belong with other survivorship benefits that do not form part of the decedent’s properties, but are nonetheless payable to the decedent’s legal heirs not as inheritance but as forms of benefits.
The Supreme Court has then ruled that the death benefits should be awarded only to the surviving legitimate spouse, despite being long estranged from the seafarer, alongside the seafarer’s legitimate and illegitimate children.
“The Court is bound to find that the benefits for the death of a seafarer cannot be awarded to a spouse with whom he has shared 25 years of his life, but whose union is illegal in the eyes of the law; and that said benefits instead belong to the legal spouse and the three children who survived him who, regardless of the marital circumstances they were born into, are unqualifiedly entitled to the benefit provided by law for their unquantifiable loss of a father.”
Atty. Dennis R. Gorecho heads the seafarers’ division of the Sapalo Velez Bundang Bulilan law offices. For comments, e-mail info@sapalovelez.com, or call 0917-5025808 or 0908-8665786.
