DSEJ accepts allegation of insufficient supervision

Leong Vai Kei, head of the Education Department at DSEJ

The Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (DSEJ) has accepted the Audit Commission’s allegation last week that the bureau’s regulation of tuition fees charged by private schools that also receive public subsidies is insufficient. The DSEJ maintained, however, that they have already collected all receipts for the subsidized activities.
According to last week’s audit report, some of the schools under the supervision of the DSEJ were illegally charging tuition fees, or did not decrease their fees as required by the bureau. The report also found that there was a lack of receipts for the subsidies provided by the Education Development Fund. The report alleged that the bureau had failed to appropriately address these issues.
The DSEJ has explained that the academic year of 2012/13 was the first in which the bureau had asked for receipts, and a longer than expected collection of the receipts had meant that some were necessarily absent from the audit report. The bureau added that schools are now required to keep their receipts for five years, according to recently introduced regulations.
“I want to emphasize that we took [a] longer time than usual to collect some of the receipts and therefore some of the receipts were missing in the audit report. However, they were actually not missing as the receipts were confirmed by our staff workers. Now all the receipts are there and we have already collected them,” Leong Vai Kei, head of the bureau’s education department, told TDM.
In reaction to the finding that some schools have not cut their tuition fees, Wong I Lin, coordinator of the bureau’s school inspection division, said that “during the process, many schools have lowered the tuition fees […] however, we have just found one school that has increased tuition; but the increase is smaller than before.”
The bureau added that some schools have already taken its suggestion of lowering tuition.