The Commission on Audit (COA) has flagged the Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) over its scholarship program in 2022 since only one out of 17 persons declared eligible by the agency was found to have met the required eligibility.

In its Annual Audit Report (AAR), the COA worried that the non-compliance of the applicants to the requirements of the PhilSA Advanced Degrees for Accelerating Strategic Space Applications (AD ASTRA) Scholarship guidelines cast "doubt on the integrity and fairness of the evaluation and approval process."

The guidelines require applicants not to be more than 45 years old, a Filipino citizen, of good moral character, in good physical and mental health, have a relevant Bachelor's Degree or Master's Degree, among many other things.

While the guidelines did not specify the documents to be submitted for each eligibility requirement, the PhilSA required applicants to submit certain documents.

COA said that in 2022, 18 individuals applied for the scholarship program. Out of 18 applicants, 11 were approved by the Scholarship Committee (SC) as eligible, with four of them comprising the international scholarship and seven comprising the local scholarship. Six were disapproved, while one withdrew his or her application.

"We noted that all of the 17 applicants were determined by the SC to have passed the eligibility requirements and considered to have necessary documents to support their application. Out of the 17 applicants, 11 or 65 percent have been approved while six or 35 percent were disapproved by the SC," it said.

However, when state auditors checked the eligibility documents submitted, they discovered that only one out of the 17 applicants who have been determined by the SC as eligible is indeed considered as eligible, it noted.

The third requirement of the program is for applicants to be physically and mentally fit, so the PhilSA asked applicants to submit medical certificates, it said.

"However, we noticed that only five applicants have submitted medical certifications which vouched for their physical and mental fitness. The remaining 12 applicants have neither medical certificate to indicate their mental fitness nor substantiated with documents which will show their physical and mental health," it also said.

COA said that for the requirement of good moral character, PhilSA required the submission of recommendation letters from previous professors or supervisors. "However, for 14 cases, good moral character is not evident from the review of the recommendation letters as these do not indicate the moral standing of the applicant, rather, it was the intellectual standing of the applicants that were vouched as evidenced by the words used in the letters," it said.

"In sum, only one or six percent out of the 17 applicants should have been considered to have complied with the submission requirements for eligibility and thus should have been approved contrary to the determination of the SC wherein 11 have been approved for the scholarship award," it added.

The COA has recommended that PhilSA revisit its scholarship eligibility requirement and reconsider the pass/fail criteria in its screening process. Instead of asking for recommendation letters that vouch for the intellectual capability of applicants, the COA likewise suggested that PhilSA ask for equivalent documents that would validate their good moral standing.

Should applicants still be approved despite non-compliance with the necessary documents, COA said that PhilSA should provide a justification as to why they passed applicants for the scholarship program.