Anomalies uncovered in DepEd-ARMM payroll

COTABATO CITY — Experts tasked to straighten out the seemingly anomalous payroll of the Department of Education in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (DepEd-ARMM) have uncovered irregularities which they said could have divested the agency of huge sums of money.

Lawyer Cynthia Guiani-Sayadi, ARMM solicitor-general, said they discovered, after a thorough investigation, that there are teachers with appointments but whose names do not appear in the payroll, while others with no appointments are listed.

"These are just the irregularities we have uncovered initially while pushing ahead with our inventory of all the teachers in the ARMM and checking if all of those receiving salaries from the DepEd-ARMM, indeed, exist," Guiani-Sayadi said.

ARMM Gov. Zaldy Ampatuan, who is exercising ministerial authority over the DepEd-ARMM, formed two weeks a special group to investigate the exact number of regional teachers in a bid to rid the department of "ghost" teachers and professionalize the flow of funds for salaries from the Department of Budget and Management down to the public schools, even in the region’s remotest towns.

Guiani-Sayadi, a member of the special inventory group, said they are also scrutinizing now the list of provisional and substitute teachers in the autonomous region.

"We are urging all existing legitimate DepEd-ARMM teachers in the region to fully cooperate with the efforts of Gov. Ampatuan in establishing special mechanisms that will ensure the prompt payment of their salaries and at the same time, protect the department from any fund irregularities," she said.

The regional information chief, Samsom Gogo, said the salaries of teachers for the months of October and November have been settled.

"The salary for November 2005 was released quite late because of the inventory of teachers across the region as part of Gov. Ampatuan’s move to cleanse the DepEd-ARMM payroll of ‘ghost’ teachers," Gogo said.

Ampatuan, who took over as the ARMM’s fifth elected governor last Sept. 30, earlier said he had made representations with the national government regarding the unpaid salaries of thousands of the region’s teachers for August and September.

Ampatuan, however, said such an initiative is fraught with "extreme difficulties" since the funds for the salaries of ARMM teachers had been released to the regional education department long before he took office.

Gogo, director of the ARMM’s Bureau of Public Information, said Ampatuan cannot use the funds which the DBM will release for the salaries of teachers in the coming months to settle the unpaid payroll for August and September.

"It is not allowed under the rules and operating procedures of the Commission on Audit and the DBM," Gogo told The STAR.