COA wants probe of Binay’s scholarship program

MANILA, Philippines - The Commission on Audit (COA) is calling for an investigation on a scholarship program of Vice President Jejomar Binay following allegations that it has been used to finance expensive post-graduate courses.

Last year, the Office of the Vice President (OVP) spent over P3.404 million for the Vice President Jejomar C. Binay (VPJCB) scholarship program without clear-cut guidelines on how the selection of economically deprived students entitled to educational assistance or subsidies should be carried out, the COA said in a 2014 report released last week.

State auditors saw no statement of the goals, objectives, criteria or basis for the qualifications of grantees; no social obligations or commitment on the part of the grantee, and no feedback mechanism and monitoring scheme. 

The OVP designed the VPJCB scholarship program between 2011 and 2012 under questionable guidelines that were too general, had no statement of policy stated, and no program objective defined, COA said.

Designed for the University of Batangas (UB), the program “is discriminatory being applicable only to Batangueños, not open to prospective beneficiaries from other provinces,” state auditors said.

“The benefit was limited to Batangueños only considering that the source of fund comes from the General Appropriations Act,” they said.

The OVP entered into a memorandum of agreement with the UB, Manila Central University, and the University of the Philippines-Diliman, state auditors said.

Based on the agreement, “the OVP aims to assist underprivileged but deserving public and private high school students through the provision of scholarship grants to pursue higher education consistent with the constitutional mandate that the state shall establish and maintain a system of scholarship grants, student loan programs, subsidies and other incentives which shall be available to deserving students in both public and private schools especially to the underprivileged,” state auditors said.

“Based on the foregoing, the scholarship assistance shall be granted to high school graduating students who are to take up collegiate/baccalaureate degrees in the tertiary level,” they said. 

However, the MOA did not strictly adhere to the objective of the scholarship grant as the OVP provided two scholars in the MCU College of Medicine to enroll under the scholarship program, state auditors said.

“The audit team considered that medicine was not among the courses covered by the scholarship program since medicine proper is a graduate or post-degree course and not a baccalaureate degree,” the COA statement read.

State auditors said the same issue was also observed in the MOA with UP where the OVP provided for five scholars in the College of Law, also a graduate or post-degree course. 

The OVP, in its defense, explained that “it overlooked… the economic status of the scholarship grantees in medicine,” COA said. 

State auditors, recommending a review of the guidelines of the VPJCP scholarship program, said the OVP should “investigate and hold liable persons responsible for allowing an expensive post-graduate course to qualify in the scholarship program considering that the grantees in medicine were not economically deprived contrary to the constitutional provision of the state to establish and maintain a system of scholarship grants to be made available to deserving students in both public and private schools, especially to the underprivileged.”