More ‘ghost’ teachers, schools, pupils taken off ARMM budget

COTABATO CITY – At least four non-existent schools, 40 ‘ghost’ teachers and 80,000 bogus students have been purged from the budget of the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, regional officials said here Monday.

Citing a report from the ARMM’s Commission on Audit, ARMM Education Secretary Jamal Kulayan said this development has saved the regional government millions of pesos in teacher salaries and school subsidies.

With a workforce of between 18,000 and 23,000 teaching and non-teaching personnel, the ARMM’s Department of Education is among the regional agencies with the biggest allocations in the annual budget.

ARMM Gov. Mujiv Hataman said the removal of ‘ghost’ teachers from the regional payroll would eventually translate to annual savings of about P30 million.

He said an investigation was being conducted and that several persons had been identified as being behind the scam.

He would not name names but Kulayan hinted said “10 criminal and administrative charges” were being prepared against active ARMM officials and employees.

Hataman said to prevent a repeat of the anomaly in the future, some innovations had been put in place, such as the assignment of learners’ reference number (LRN), a system akin to the University of the Philippines’ permanent student number system.

For teachers in areas near this city, seat of the ARMM central government, Hataman said a common salary releasing window for teacher-claimants was established just outside his office.

“No proxy-claimants are allowed,” he said.

For those in other areas, teachers are asked to go to branches of the Land Bank of the Philippines nearest them, where they can open an account.

Kulayan said another innovation that the Hataman government has put in place was the merging of schools division offices.

This, he said, resulted in a centralized system and made supervision of teachers easier.