Commission of Audit of Macao SAR

1.1 Audit findings and opinions

1.1.1 Admitting, assessing and approving courses of continuing education

1.1.1.1 Legal deadlines for admitting courses

Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (DSEJ, as abbreviated in Portuguese) didn’t comply with the deadlines stated in number 2 of the Article 8 of the Administrative Regulation Nr 16/2011 for admitting courses applying for subsidy and by so doing 402 courses and qualification examinations submitted by 32 institutions have been unduly admitted. DSEJ explained that the reopening of the online programme to the institutions concerned was justified by the fact that the courses they had submitted within the application periods have not been received due to technical problems of DSEJ’s information system. DSEJ initially declared that it could prove which institutions were affected by the problems but eventually it was not able to present them, which means DSEJ reopened the online programme without any objective proof that the concerned institutions didn’t present the courses because of problems with the information system. Moreover, there’s no registration of any due authorization procedure from the rightful entity to reopen the programme to admit the belated applications.

The handling of the reopening of the online programme harmed the rights of the insti-tutions that presented their courses for subsidies within the established periods, jeopardizes the oversight on any reasonable reopening of the programme in the future and even puts into question the legitimacy of reopening itself.

1.1.1.2 Discarding of the account opening receipt

Three out of the thirty two institutions that applied after the deadlines had no account at DSEJ by the time of the respective applications periods, and in accordance with the current regulations they were not qualified for applying for subsidies awarded under the Continuing Education and Development Plan (hereinafter referred to as “Plan”). DSEJ explained that its workers assigned for processing the applications for account opening didn’t complete the procedures in due time, so the online programme was exceptionally reopened for the institutions to present their courses. Considering the given explanation, the Commission of Audit (CA) requested DSEJ to hand over the receipts of the applications for account opening in order to verify those applications’ dates. However, DSEJ informed that the receipts had been discarded during the filing of the concluded applications. CA regards the reported handling quite unreasonable since it implied an additional operation during the filing procedure, which is to detach the receipt from the rest of the documents. A written record proving the receipt of documents tendered by someone is very important in the public administrative procedure since the “receipt date” is crucial to define the date from which certain rights are acquired or that the term of certain case starts to count.

1.1.1.3 Setting, amending and applying evaluation procedures and criteria

Only two out of the nine assessment factors had corresponding written rules on scoring while for the remaining factors only verbal orientations were given out. The situation may give rise to different interpretations making difficult to assure that everyone participating in the assessment procedures has a homogeneous approach. Additionally, five out of the nine factors were applied differently from what have been agreed upon, causing the undue admission of a number of courses and, consequently, lowering the quality of the courses admitted to the Plan and affecting the impartiality of the assessment results. It must also be underlined that without a set of written procedures and the lacking a hierarchical control mechanism, the introduction and withdrawal of scoring rules have been done with a high degree of arbitrariness.

1.1.1.4 Procedures on authorizing and publicizing the results of the applications for subsidies granted by the Plan

The admitted courses are assessed using an online programme. After the assessment, relevant information is extracted from the programme to create a verification document, which nevertheless doesn’t include the scores and the assessment results. The chief of the relevant subgroup conducts the verification and reintroduces, manually, those two elements. If he deems it appropriate, he could amend the scores and the results entered in the assessment procedure directly in the verification document, without registering the reasons. With the amendments put in, if any, the results are submitted to the authorization of DSEJ’s director. The audit verified that the procedure described above unduly admitted 594 more courses, which going by the current scoring rules, should have been eliminated. On the other hand, in the procedure of publicizing the courses admitted to the Plan, the audit verified that the fees and teaching hours of 612 announced courses were different from those authorized by DSEJ. Examples: 1) a course has been authorized to charge 560 patacas, but in the publicizing the announced fees totalled 800 patacas, giving rise to a more hefty subsidy for the institution; 2) DSEJ had excluded a course but it has been announced as being subsidized; 3) authorized courses but announced as not subsidized.

The audit findings presented above show that the verification, authorization and publicizing procedures are harmed by significant deficiencies, since they are not subject to adequate and effective controls.

1.1.1.5 Quantification of the audit results

A quantification of the corresponding subsidies to the courses admitted to the Plan by infringing the relevant administrative regulation or the scoring rules generated the following results: maximum amount of subsidies at 108 506 75,50 patacas and subsidies already paid out totalled 22 021 283,00 patacas. It must be underlined that courses that had failed simultaneously by more than one assessment factors were counted only once.

1.1.2 On-site inspection

The audit examination verified that DSEJ didn’t consistently and effectively implement a measure established by itself, which requires that every institution participating in the Plan should be inspected in the month in which it starts offering courses. So DSEJ failed in maintaining a total inspection. DSEJ launched in 2012 a new “regime of institutions classification” which served as a basis to set the frequency of inspections a continuing education institution would be subject to. However, DSEJ incorrectly classified 28 institutions, inclusively some of them which have never been inspected were classified as “honest institutions”. This could not be possible because the title to be awarded depended on the results of on-site inspections. The finding reveals that the regime was implemented ineffectively.

The inspections executed in accordance with the current rules are unable to confirm the identity of the trainers. Also, the information collected by the inspection is deficient and not sufficient (560 out of 1 462 inspection reports examined by CA contained errors or omissions), which makes difficult to use the inspection reports as basis for follow-up works. On the other hand, reported situations that recommend follow-up were not further investigated by the relevant personnel of DSEJ, rendering the on-site inspection ineffective.

1.1.3 Guarantee fee

In accordance with the Instructions set by DSEJ, the educational institutions should introduce in its online programme the attendance rate of the students of a subsidized course within seven days upon its conclusion, in order to release the guarantee fee from the respective students’ accounts. However, the audit examination verified that up to February 2012 there were institutions that failed to introduced the required data relating to 2 143 persons, which impeded the release of their guarantee fees; in other words, impeded the account holders were impeded from make the best use of their money.

Following the same Instructions, if a student didn’t attain the required minimum attendance rate, his guarantee fee would be forfeited. The attendance rate was set by the educational institution and the truthfulness and the correctness of the information on the students’ attendance rate relied entirely on the spirit of compliance of the institution. The audit examination verified that some educational institutions tolerated evident infringements which showed that their spirit of compliance was still weak. Information on the attendance rate of 60 students from 24 courses offered by these institutions contained errors, which permitted the releasing of their guarantee fees instead of forfeiting them. The situation also reveals the ineffectiveness of the oversight conducted by DSEJ.

1.1.4 Enrolment in the courses

1.1.4.1 Back up procedure for enrolment

With the objective of avoiding theft of personal data, when the resident proceeded to confirm his enrolment in a course he must insert his identification card into the electronic identity card reader provided by DSEJ to all joining educational institutions. However, when the card reader stopped running, or when the enrolment were handled by a third party or, still, when there was a big number of enrolments presented by only one person the back up procedure would be used. By this procedure, the candidate to a course just filled in the enrolment form and would leave the rest to the educational institution, namely the submission of the application form to DSEJ, which also concludes the enrolment procedure. The audit verified that just within the first 8 months, the Plan registered 3 330 enrolments through the back up procedure, 88.8% of which were justified with problems of the card reader or enrolment through third parties. The situation may point to an abusive usage of the procedure. Until the end of the audit process, DSEJ continued leaving the identity of the persons enrolled through the back up procedure unchecked, which reveals that DSEJ continued lacking an effective mechanism to prevent personal data stealing.

1.1.4.2 Trainer as trainee in the same course

Among the courses of the three phases of the Plan, the audit examination detected 6 courses, already carried out and paid by DSEJ, in which the trainer was also enrolled as trainee in the same course he taught and that DSEJ had overlooked this evident irregularity.

1.1.5 Special case that deserves greater attention

39 courses that didn’t satisfy the criteria set in the scoring rules were approved to join the Plan without any reasonable justification. What happened reveals that DSEJ applied the laid down criteria with too great flexibility.

In accordance with the internal rules of assessment set by DSEJ, the guiding values for enrolment fees varied according to the nature of the educational institution, and these internal rules were confidential. However, in the special case analyzed in the present report, the institution changed its nature and increased at the same time the enrolment fees significantly almost up to the limit of the guiding values applied to the type of institutions to which it now belongs. So through an administrative operation, the institution acquired conditions to increase its income. The case analyzed shows that DSEJ has no effective way to prevent such schemes.

1.2 Audit suggestions

1) In accordance with the attributions bestowed by the Administrative Regulation Nr 16/2011, DSEJ should set written scoring criteria and assessment rules for evaluating and approving courses and apply them efficiently and consistently in order to assure a greater uniformity in the assessment process and, consequently, producing more comparable results. Additionally, formal procedures should be laid down to regulate the set up and amending of the assessment rules.

2) The procedure of preparing and submitting the results list to be approved by the director of DSEJ should be reviewed in order to close the existing loopholes and also to assure that the results are correct, consistent with those produced in the assessment procedure and complete. A mechanism should also be set up to assure that the publicized courses correspond to those approved by the rightful entity.

3) The on-site inspection mechanism should be reviewed in order to effectively control the quality of the courses and to prevent possible frauds. The review should include the organization, the scheduling and the quality of the inspectors and also the methodology for collecting information. The rules and criteria should be observed rigorously, namely in regard to the classification of the institutions for the purpose of inspection and collecting attendance lists. The findings disclosed in this audit report should be taken into consideration when analyzing the current or planned works in order to contribute to the achievement of the objectives.

4) The handling of the guarantee fee should be reviewed, namely: the attendance rate must be effectively confirmed before releasing the guarantee fee; all information on attendance provided by the educational institutions must be examined and any obvious infringements should be investigated.

5) The back up procedure for enrolment should be reviewed whereby the preventive measures against deceptive practices to obtain subsidies should be reexamined in order to eliminate the risks of fraud.

6) Considering the problems specific to the various procedures and the special case presented in this audit report, DSEJ should completely review the execution of the Plan in order to close the detected loopholes.

«Continuing Education and Development Plan»