MANILA — Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian on Monday said non-poor students were benefitting from the Department of Education's voucher program for junior and senior high school.

Speaking on ANC, Gatchalian said many non-poor students were receiving billions of pesos in education subsidies to enroll in private institutions.

"We don't even know… if these students [were] even in the middle class but because there's no income classification, P14 billion is being channeled to non-poor students," he said.

Gatchalian, who chairs the Senate Committee on Basic Education, said subsidizing those who are not considered poor is not the goal of the voucher program of the Expanded Government Assistance to Students or E-GASTPE.

"The intention of the program is to target poor but deserving students, and for me that is a big leakage that we need to change or else resources are not allocated efficiently," he said.

'GHOST STUDENTS'

At a Senate hearing last month, Gatchalian revealed that more than 19,000 "ghost" or undocumented students were benefitting from the voucher program, citing the 2016 and 2018 reports from the Commission on Audit (COA).

Imelda Celso, COA supervising auditor, said that ghost students include learners "whose absence cannot be satisfactorily explained by the school officials," students under a specific school but who attend a different school or campus, or are "listed as enrolled but have not attended classes since the start of the semester."

Gatchalian said the DepEd has committed to come up with a department order to address the "loopholes" in the current voucher system, which also aims to decongest public schools.

"We will be holding institutions to account, both the private schools and PEAC (Private Education Assistance Committee) and DepEd," he added.

PEAC acts as the gatekeeper of the voucher program.

The senator also stressed the need to improve the validation process for the program, which admits tens of thousands of students a year, "without hampering the cash flow and the operations of the school."

Vice President and Education Secretary Sara Duterte has said that the DepEd will immediately act should there be issues in the program.

The DepEd has also previously announced that some schools with reported irregularities in the implementation of the voucher program have started refunding the government subsidies given to them.

Voucher program questioned due to alleged 'ghost students'