Deplorable DepEd deficiencies

The credibility of the Department of Education (DepEd) and the integrity of its leadership have once again been put into question, with the Commission on Audit (COA) flagging the agency last week for failing to remit P4.47 billion in premium and loan payments it had deducted from its employees to the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS).

In its 2022 audit report, the COA said the unremitted GSIS contributions are on top of the P193.7 million employee premiums and housing loan amortizations that the DepEd had failed to turn over to Pag-Ibig or the Home Development Mutual Fund.

The state auditing firm also found that the DepEd did not remit its employees’ member contributions worth P307 million to the Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth), and failed to pay the Bureau of Internal Revenue the P572.6 million in taxes it had withheld from salaries, benefits, and contracts with suppliers.

In total, DepEd failed to remit more than P5 billion worth of taxes and contributions already collected from its personnel which, COA said, exposed these employees to the risk of possible penalties and surcharges from the agencies involved, and might have robbed them of access to privileges and benefits due them.

Opaque and suspicious transactions

“The failure by the DepEd offices to remit the premium contributions deprived their employees of the opportunity to avail of loan privileges, earn yearly dividends, and such other benefits offered to all GSIS members, thereby causing undue injury to them,” the COA pointed out.

COA, however, acknowledged that the amounts due PhilHealth and Pag-Ibig included sums from previous years that needed to be reconciled with existing records of the agencies concerned. In response, DepEd spokesperson Michael Poa said the education department was working with the GSIS to reconcile its balance and have dedicated account officers to cater to DepEd personnel.

Poa’s words, however, provide scant comfort to taxpayers who are painfully aware of DepEd’s long record of opaque and suspicious transactions that have resulted in the unexplained loss of billions in public funds. In this case, one has to ask: How could such a stupendous amount in unremitted collection go unnoticed for so many years? Were some parties profiting—perhaps in bank interests—by letting the oversight languish until the COA reported it? If the collection of the employees’ contribution and their turnover to the appropriate government bodies proved too arduous a task for the lumbering bureaucracy, couldn’t it be given to the respective offices where the employees are actually assigned? One does not need an efficiency expert to note that these “weaknesses in the controls”—as the COA so charitably described it—have been so habitually exploited in DepEd transactions that “agency-wide corruption” seems to be the only reason one can summon to explain it.

Crosshairs of the law

Take note, for instance, that aside from the unremitted billions, the 2022 COA report rapped the DepEd for issuing P5.7 million worth of laptops, cameras, and mobile phones to nonteaching personnel of the Caloocan schools division office proper, “and [those] whose functions are administrative and supervisory in nature, raising doubts as to the propriety and necessity of the procured devices.”

Such wanton disregard for its own rules has put some DepEd officials at the crosshairs of the law. In August this year, the Office of the Ombudsman ordered the six-month suspension without pay of several officials of DepEd and the Procurement Service of the Department of Budget and Management (PS-DBM), after a series of congressional hearings linked them to the anomalous purchase of overpriced laptops that contained low-end processors. In its 2021 report, the COA noted that P2.4 billion was approved for laptops for online teachers during the pandemic, with a stated price of P35,046 per unit. DepEd, however, settled with PS-DBM’s inflated price of P58,300 that “adversely decreased the number of intended beneficiaries from 68,500 to 39,583 public school teachers,” the COA report said of the transaction made under the term of DepEd Secretary Leonor Briones.

Surveillance of campuses

More outrageous still was how the laptops intended for public school teachers ended up being sold at a bargain in retail stores after DepEd’s little-known logistics provider, Transpac Cargo Logistics Inc., tried to recoup its costs when the agency proved too slow paying its obligations.

On top of the agency’s deplorable list of deficiencies came the request for P150 million confidential funds from DepEd Secretary Sara Duterte—since disapproved by Congress—that she earlier said would be used for surveillance of campuses where alleged communist-linked organizations were actively recruiting students.

Given the dubious deals happening at DepEd for years, the agency might be better served with an extensive surveillance of its erring finance managers and procurement officers, who should be made fully accountable under the Civil Service Commission rules.