Pro-democracy lawmaker Sulu Sou is concerned about the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau’s (DSEJ) lack of supervisory capacity, due to the high amount of subsidies that have been attributed to school institutions over the years. He expressed the concerns via a written inquiry to the government, calling for a stricter mechanism of supervision.
Sou’s inquiry comes after it was revealed last week that two former school heads were involved in a case of fraud worth MOP20 million.
According to the lawmaker, the mechanism of supervision the DSEJ uses is inefficient and lacks the resources to ensure that public money is well spent.
The lawmaker noted that the DSEJ only has 14 staff to review thousands of subsidy applications, grants, and reports from all of the school institutions in Macau.
The financial supervision mechanism over the Education Development Fund (FDE) is mainly on the line, though not exclusively.
The FDE aims to support and promote educational plans and activities in non-higher education fields, through the granting of non-refundable subsidies and subsidized credits to school institutions.
The lawmaker also extended his concerns to other forms of government financing for private schools which suffer the same problem as the FDE.
In his inquiry, Sou noted how over the last 15 years the subsidies attributed to schools have been growing exponentially. In particular, when the FDE was first created in 2007, it had a budget of only MOP15 million. In 2020, this amount was raised to a total of MOP803 million. Together with the free education subsidy, subsidies from the DSEJ are worth almost MOP4 billion yearly.
Sou is also calling to revive an audit report from 2015, when the Audit Commission also noted that the DSEJ’s regulation of tuition fees charged by private schools which also receive public subsidies was insufficient.
At the time, the DSEJ accepted the commission’s allegations. However, not much has been changed to improve the system since then.
Sou is now urging the new government to take action to protect the interests of all Macau citizens and to stop what he calls the “education finance black hole.” He suggested that professional staff be hired to review the subsidy applications and reports, as well as electronic monitoring systems to ensure that the entire process is fraud-free.
In response to the case of the former school heads involved in a MOP20 million fraud case, the Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture, Elsie Ao Ieong U, said last week that she has already ordered the DSEJ to review the subsidy granting process for local schools in the last five years and submit a complete report to her office within three months.
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