Discretionary Duty vs. Ministerial Duty

 "It seems that respondent has an erroneous interpretation of what a ministerial duty entails. This Court distinguished discretionary functions from ministerial duties in Sanson v. Barrios:53

Discretion, when applied to public functionaries, means a power or right conferred upon them by law of acting officially, under certain circumstances, according to the dictates of their own judgments and consciences, uncontrolled by the judgments or consciences of others. A purely ministerial act or duty, in contradistinction to a discretional act, is one which an officer or tribunal performs in a given state of facts, in a prescribed manner, in obedience to the mandate of legal authority, without regard to or the exercise of hi s own judgment, upon the propriety or impropriety of the act done. If the law imposes a duty upon a public officer, and gives him the right to decide how or when the duty shall be performed, such duty is discretionary and not ministerial. The duty is ministerial only when the discharge of the same requires neither the exercise of official discretion nor judgment.54 (Citation omitted)

Thus, although respondent's function as an assistant registration officer is indeed ministerial, this does not mean that she must blindly approve all applications submitted to her office. It is ministerial in that when a properly accomplished application is presented before her accompanied by all the necessary documents, she has no choice but to approve and process the registration. Conversely, if the application filed is invalid or missing the required attachments, such as an affidavit of the contracting parties or a marriage license, her duty is to deny the registration.

Even if respondent was not tasked with determining if fraud was committed in the application for marriage certificate, it was her duty to demand that the supporting documents be present upon submission as a precaution to the registration of a spurious document."

OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY OMBUDSMAN FOR MINDANAO, PETITIONER, V. ANTONIETA A. LLAUDER, RESPONDENT.
G.R. No. 219062, January 29, 2020.