The Commission of Audit (CA) released the audit report “Effects of Previous Audit Reports – Continuing Education and Development Plan” in November 2012, which pointed out four audit findings related to the inspections of courses, including: the failure of the Education and Youth Affairs Bureau (hereinafter referred to as “DSEJ” according to Portuguese abbreviation) to fully implement the inspection mechanism for the institutions participating in the Continuing Education and Development Plan (hereinafter referred to as “the Plan”), making the inspection work could not have the anticipated effect; the ineffective inspection of the guarantee fee system; the lack of mechanism to prevent identity theft in the backup plan for enrolment; the existence of the situation in which trainers enrolled in their own courses. As the Plan has continued to be implemented and widen the scope, it involved a large amount of public funds (a total amount of 1.78 billion patacas as at 31 December 2018), CA carried out the audit to follow up the improvement made for the four audit findings, with the aim of exploring whether DSEJ has improved the inspections of courses to ensure the quality of courses and the prudent use of public funds. The audit result showed that, among the above four problems, three problems had still not been improved. CA specified these problems in the performance audit report of “Effects of Previous Audit Reports – Continuing Education and Development Plan”.
This audit found that DSEJ wrongly calculated the ranking results in January 2019 due to staff negligence, causing some institutions to be ranked incorrectly, which affected the number of inspections of the courses that would be held in next quarter. In addition, regarding the inspections of institutions carried out by DSEJ, there were 292 institutions held courses between February and April 2019, but only 49 institutions’ inspections were made according to the guideline, while 196 were not subject to any inspection. Therefore, the execution of these work was obviously unsatisfactory, and there were obvious deficiencies in the supervision of the on-site inspections.
Regarding the execution of the inspection work, CA reviewed 379 inspection records, of which six filled information incorrectly, while other aspects did not find any problems. During the on-site inspection, DSEJ carried out the data collection according to the established procedures, showing that the work had been improved.
DSEJ did not improve the work of reviewing the inspection records. CA analyzed the samples taken from 379 inspection records and found that 90 had obvious irregularities, which was different from the review result of DSEJ. This reflected that some DSEJ staff did not carry out the review in accordance with the instruction. Besides, owing to the lack of identity information of trainees, it was difficult for DSEJ to verify whether the signatures on attendance form were signed by trainees themselves and consistent with the signatures on identity cards, or were forged by others. Therefore, there is a doubt about the effectiveness of the measure for verifying the signatures. As to the verification of trainer’s identity, the audit found cases in which the trainers did not sign according to the signature on their identity cards, but DSEJ did not discover the fact. Moreover, if someone else signs the name of the trainer declared before on the inspection report and attendance form, according to the current review method, the staff of DSEJ will not suspect the trainer’s signature and verify it. Therefore, the effectiveness of the current verification mechanism is unsatisfactory.
Regarding the backup plan for enrolment, DSEJ introduced a way in which applicants enroll courses by inserting their identity cards in order to restrain fraudsters from falsifying the information of applicants and thus defrauding the subsidy of the government. When applicants cannot enroll courses by inserting their identity cards under certain circumstances, the backup plan for enrolment is an alternative solution. However, since DSEJ did not formulate management and monitoring measures on the application of the backup plan, some institutions use the backup plan regularly, but DSEJ was not aware of this situation and did not follow up. For the monitoring of the backup plan, DSEJ has changed the sampling method to be risk-oriented since February 2019; however, the audit found that there was a case in which trainees enrolled in different courses, but when the institution processed the 82 enrollment forms (involving 47 trainees and 43 courses), it used a same phone number for trainees to register in the enrollment system of the Plan. As the monitoring work of telephone interview is based on the phone number entered by the institution that adopts the backup plan to contact trainees, therefore it is doubtful whether the phone number registered by the institution belonged to the trainees or not.
The audit found that the deposits in nearly 30% of registrations were frozen because the institutions did not update the attendance information within 7 days after the completion of the courses. As a result, those deposits could not be used by trainees in a timely manner; besides, the proportion of samples selected by DSEJ to verify the attendance rate of trainees was too low, which caused the inadequate supervision on the truthfulness of the information provided by institutions. This showed that the improvement measures taken by DSEJ were unsatisfactory.
After DSEJ improved its system in January 2013, the system can automatically check whether the trainers enroll in their own courses. Therefore, this audit finding was improved.
In the general comments, CA pointed out that during the period of the previous audit, that is, from the launch of the Plan in July 2011 to June 2012, the amount paid by DSEJ was about 150 million patacas. Then the Plan went through three phases and until 31 December 2018, the total amount reached 1.78 billion patacas. Due to the large amount of public funds involved, the good execution and supervision of the Plan are very important to its success. Currently, in terms of supervision, DSEJ carries out the grading of institutions and inspections to monitor whether the courses organized by institutions correspond with the requirements in organizing those courses. However, this audit found that the penalties of these monitoring measures were too lenient, failing to improve the problems, which affected the effectiveness of the Plan.
It is noticeable that when facing the audit supervision, DSEJ always emphasized that the failure to fully perform its supervision duty was because of the insufficient human resources. However, the Plan has continued to increase its size over the years, and has even covered overseas institutions. When it was impossible to ensure a sound system and an effective supervision, DSEJ continued to expand the coverage of the Plan, which contradicted the argument of the lack of human resources. On the other hand, since the launch of the Plan, there have been cases where educational institutions involved in crime due to irregular operation, false signatures or documents, fraud, etc., and dozens of which were followed up by judicial authorities owing to serious law violation. This not only reflects that the execution of the Plan had loopholes, but also shows that the practice of splashing out large amount of public funds on the Plan had deficiencies, causing the educational institutions took risks in the hope that they might not be caught. Although DSEJ publicly stressed that the percentage of the cases in serious breach of the law was low, the occurrence of the crime problem in the Plan, the purpose of which is to promote learning, is not a situation that the Government and the public are willing to see. Moreover, these cases would increase the workload of DSEJ and judicial authorities, and wasted the precious public resources. Since this series of problems arose in the implementation of the Plan, DSEJ has to take it seriously.
In conclusion, DSEJ did not fully implement the audit opinions and suggestions and failed to yield satisfactory results, but has continued to spend hundreds of millions of public funds, which reflects that there was no positive and effective inspection mechanism in the management and execution of the relative work. DSEJ must conduct a thorough reform for the better implement of the Plan in the future.
The report was previously submitted to the Chief Executive and it can be downloaded from the Commission of Audit’s website (http://www.ca.gov.mo), also it is freely available at the Commission of Audit Office from today during office hours.
