Senator Sherwin Gatchalian questioned on Wednesday, March 20, the presence of alleged "ghost students" in the country's Senior High School Voucher Program (SHS-VP).

According to Imelda Celso of the Commission on Audit (COA), ghost students refer to those who were named twice or more in billing statements. However, she pointed out that it was actually an error in the monitoring or in the listing of the beneficiaries.

Gatchalian states that the mere fact that there are refunds shows that there are indeed ghost students.

"If you admit to a refund, then you admit that there is something wrong," he said.

Gatchalian specifically cited a report from the Private Education Assistance Committee (PEAC), which indicated huge amounts of refunds in the SHS-VP. He questioned how schools could rack up refunds as high as P80 million, P68 million, and P14 million.

"How did it reach this big?" he said as the Senate Committee on Basic Education resumed its inquiry on the implementation of the Expanded Government Assistance to Students and Teachers in Private Education (E-GASTPE) Act.

"Then I saw also in a PEAC report that we're still expecting P239 million to be refunded. This is another report we got from PEAC...And then one school can rack up up to P80 million in terms of refund," he added.

The senator sought to find out if there was a deliberate attempt to defraud the government.

According to Rodrick Edsel Malonzo from PEAC, one school for example could not present documents on the majority of their Voucher Program Beneficiaries (VPBs).

"In other words, they are billing the government but they cannot present documents to prove the existence of those students," Gatchalian said.

Currently, there are 19,139 ghost or "undocumented" students from SHS-VP participant schools.

Gatchalian also said that it's the poor that should be prioritized in the SHS-VP. He sought to correct the Department of Education's (DepEd) implementation of SHS-VP after finding that most of its beneficiaries were from privileged families.

The senator lamented the lack of DepEd guidelines to qualify SHSVP beneficiaries. As a result, he said that 64 percent of SHS-VP beneficiaries for school year (SY) 2019 to 2020 came from non-poor households, which received aid amounting to some P7.3 billion.

The same was the case during SY 2021 to 2022, with 70 percent of the SHSVP funds, or P7.2 billion, going to non-poor beneficiaries.

"We have to make sure that every centavo allocated and appropriated to government goes to our poor learners," Gatchalian said.