IT HAS been no secret to the new bosses at the Department of Education, Culture and Sports (DECS) that the procurement of textbook and supplementary educational materials had for the last 20 years or so yielded fat dividends for a significant number of the department's officials and personnel.

But DECS Undersecretary Antonio Valdes, who has barely warmed his seat at the department, said they have just made it harder for such people to profit from these procurements, and are warning DECS suppliers to unlearn their old tricks—or else.

Suppliers themselves agreed with some former and current government officials that the dirty deals had not only led to hundreds of millions of pesos of public funds going to pockets of corrupt individuals, but also to a critical textbook shortage. They add that it is likely that the dismal quality of many textbooks can also be traced to corrupt practices, which puts a premium on little else besides profits.

In an interview, Valdes said that the various internal controls DECS recently adopted in textbook purchases will double the number of books for the country's 45,000 public schools.

But he also admitted that no system is foolproof and that there are just some things they cannot undo, even if they wanted to.

If the new DECS officials could only have their way, for instance, they would bid out contracts for textbooks covered by the P200 million released by Department of Budget and Management (DBM) last Jan. 15 and which is now at the center of controversy because of an alleged bribe attempt. But, said Valdes, in this case, public bidding is out of the question.

The money, he explained, is drawn from the 1998 DECS budget and must therefore be used according to the guidelines that prevailed that year. "Our hands are tied," he said.

Approved by then DECS Secretary Ricardo Gloria, these guidelines eschew public biddings in favor of "school empowerment" in purchase of the books. But they have led to huge payoffs given the many levels of DECS personnel involved in the purchase and whom publishers and their middlemen needed to entice with kickbacks or "SOPs" to ensure orders. More often than not, said the publishers, the merits of a book had not been prime considerations in the decision over which to buy.

The school principals chose titles from the list of DECS-approved textbooks developed by the private sector. While publishers agree that principals ought to be the best people to judge what their schools needed, this was hardly so in public schools. Pointed out one publishing house official: "For 25 years, they never chose the books they used."

Indeed, since the 1970s DECS had dictated which titles public schools should buy. Until 1995, each subject per grade level had just one prescribed title. Following the enactment of Republic Act 8047 that year, however, DECS decided to have multiple titles per subject per grade level. But all the textbooks still needed DECS approval.

Another executive of a publishing company also noted that DECS had failed to prepare the principals to select the textbooks that they needed. "The educational seminars for principals didn't push through because there was no money," he said.

Principals can also be easily dictated upon by their superiors like the district supervisor and the division superintendent, the two executives said.

Publishers have also discovered that even if the principals requisitioned certain titles, the selection can still be changed—without their knowledge or consent—by their higher-ups. When publishers or principals presented their Requisition Issue Vouchers (RIVs) to show the titles they had ordered, regional officials often whipped out their own RIVs covering a different sent of titles supposedly submitted by the principals. "It's a case of my RIV against your RIV," said a marketing executive of a publishing house.

Because of abuses of the school empowerment policy for textbook purchases, DECS is torn between giving the money to regional offices to order the books or keeping the money at the central office and ordering the books directly from publishers, Valdes said. No decision has been made.

But he said that for sure, textbooks to be purchased using the 1999 budget would be done by public bidding. The P504-million lump sum appropriations are initially estimated to buy 7.4 million textbooks.

The biddings of each regional office will be done at the DECS central office in Pasig so DECS can closely watch the proceedings. Membership of the bidding committee will change for each bidding, with most of them chosen by drawing of lots immediately before the bidding date from the 18 members who now compose the DECS Pre-Post-Qualification, Bids and Awards Committee or PBAC.

According to Valdes, the new bidding system will cut out the middleman who has made DECS purchases expensive through SOPs. "It would be illogical for a publisher to go through the bidding process using agents and brokers because they would have to incur additional marketing expenses," he argued. "Why make an agent bid for them when they can bid for themselves?"

Yet despite his optimism that it will work, he conceded that the system "is only as good as the people who will implement them." He is also not 100 percent sure of the integrity of all the members of the bidding committee. "But," he said, "what you can do is to keep them off-balance, make it uncomfortable and make it more difficult for them to cheat."

Valdes said that PBAC members will serve for only six months to a year, but not one of them knows exactly when they will be replaced.

Notwithstanding the stricter procurement guidelines, certain DECS officials and suppliers have not given up their merry old ways. Suppliers returning from the regional offices said some officials have demanded an additional 10 percent in kickbacks because it is much more difficult to rig contracts now. Some officials have also informed suppliers they need the extra money to buy off their colleagues in PBAC.

A PBAC member said one supplier has already offered him a brown envelope and another has promised to give him a 20 percent cut of the contract.

On top of a new bidding process, DECS has required suppliers to reapply for accreditation. This has worried some small publishers who said the qualifications DECS demands appear to favor big and established publishing houses.

Among other things, DECS expects publishing activity to go on when they look up the addresses that publishers declare in their application to ensure they are not fly-by-night operations or mere agents.

But some small suppliers said that while they may not have printing facilities and work out of their homes, they are nevertheless legitimate publishers who commission the titles they develop for DECS and hire other firms to print these books. They also enjoy credit access that has allowed them to meet orders from DECS over the years, they said.

At this stage, though, bidding already appears unlikely in a number of subject areas in certain grade levels.

While DECS has approved 312 titles for use as textbooks in elementary and high school, 20 subject areas in different grade levels—one core subject in elementary and six core subjects in high school—have only one title each. Public bidding is also unlikely in five subject areas with no approved titles.

Many publishers blame the failure of DECS to approve enough titles for certain subject areas chiefly on the evaluation process supervised by the DECS Instructional Materials Council Secretariat (IMCS). Of 610 titles submitted by the private sector for use as textbooks in public schools in the last two years, 50 percent got rejected, IMCS records show.

On the surface, that does not look like a bad batting average at all. In truth, authors and publishers said they would not be complaining were it not for what they perceived as inconsistent evaluations of the books they had submitted.

According to one publisher, some books got conditional approval even when they failed to cover some learning competencies required by DECS while other books were disapproved outright over a mere illustration, a selection or an exercise. Several publishers also noted that evaluators tended to reject textbooks that exceeded the minimum learning competencies or did not carry buzzwords familiar to them.

A DECS textbook evaluator is supposed to be a master teacher, subject area specialist or curriculum expert for one subject area or more, with at least five years of relevant experience in the said subject. Yet in the last two rounds of evaluation, IMCS relied on regional textbooks coordinators to nominate evaluators. During a consultative workshop with publishers, IMCS executive director J. Arthur Fernandez admitted nominations were occasionally based on friendships rather than merit and there was not enough time to orient the teachers on the evaluation process.

Some publishers said there has also been a possible leakage of the evaluators' identities, which are supposed to be confidential. Although they offer no proof, they cited publishers who claimed or appeared to know the results of the evaluation even before the results came out.

Fernandez, for his part, said he is certain there were no leaks in the first batch of textbooks. But he did not discount there might have been some the second time around. According to Fernandez, this was inevitable because some textbook writers came from DECS who naturally learned about events scheduled for evaluators. "They knew each other," he said. Still, he said, the IMCS adopted safeguards to ensure the confidentiality of the whole process.

While a decision has still to been made in the case of subjects areas with no approved titles, Fernandez and Valdez said DECS might have to continue allowing commercial reprints of DECS-owned titles in these subject areas.

DECS had ordered a stop to commercial reprints beginning last December. RA 8047, which was aimed at ending the government monopoly of textbook development and production, had given DECS three years to phase itself out of these tasks, and the education department was therefore anticipating finally turning them over to the private sector.

But giving a go-signal once more to commercial reprints may be risky since publishers and DECS officials said that in the past, abuses had attended the issuance and use of authority to reprint. Printers or publishers are supposed to secure authority from the education secretary to reprint a specified number of DECS-owned titles within one year and pay a royalty of P1 for every copy printed.

One publisher recalled paying P10,000 to facilitate the release of an authority to reprint because, she said, DECS personnel had sat on her application. In another instance, education officials stumbled upon a publisher carrying an authority to reprint with the forged signature of the DECS secretary. There have also been printers who just produced commercial reprints without approval of DECS or with expired authority. Some also sold commercial reprints intended for the general public back to DECS.

Cases of principals and superintendents procuring commercial reprints from unscrupulous firms have also been documented. A special audit of the Quezon City schools division found that in 1991, Superintendent Bienvenido Icasiano bought P1.2 million worth of textbooks from commercial printers who used permits that had expired five years before. The Commission on Audit (COA) also found that Icasiano bought commercial reprints from companies that had no authority from DECS but were merely "authorized" by another supplier with existing rights.

But Valdes is so confident about the new anti-corruption controls they have installed at DECS that he says even the procurement system of World Bank is no comparison. "Our system is more stringent than World Bank," he said. "For example, they don't have inventory checks. They also go for bidding, but their agency estimates are one-figure estimates rather than a range of high and low."

The World Bank has required DECS to adopt its procurement system for a Bank-funded purchase of textbooks. At least P200 million will be used to buy books from the private sector for schools in 26 poor provinces.

Valdes said DECS will follow the Bank's system for the project, but will ask that the department be allowed to adopt safeguards, including inventory checks, even if it means the expenses have to come out of DECS's own pocket.

The education undersecretary said that DECS is deadset about cracking down on corruption. The department has already blacklisted several suppliers, including Dane Publishing Corp., whose representatives were found carrying a letter purportedly from President Joseph Estrada directing DECS to give business to the company. "They can't do business with us until the outcome of the (National Bureau of Investigation) investigation," Valdes said.

Last December, Education Secretary Andrew Gonzalez also ordered DECS offices not to buy the Diksyunaryo ng Wikang Filipino, Sentinyal Edisyon from Merylvin Publishing House after ascertaining that there was no contract between the firm and the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF), owner of the copyright to the dictionary, to print and distribute the book.

By then, however, Merylvin had sold 1,336 copies worth a total P2.9 million to DECS National Capital Region using a certification issued in May 3, 1998 by then KWF Chairman Ponciano Pineda that company owner Esmeralda Malapit was the exclusive distributor of the hardbound dictionary. Sales were apparently helped by the fact that Merylvin had printed a picture and message of President Estrada on the back cover.

Pineda, who retired in January, has denied having anything to do with Merylvin. Yet to get him off the hook, several KWF commissioners have suggested entering into an antedated contract with Merylvin, minutes of the KWF's meetings and exchange of letters among the commissioners show.

Meanwhile, to cut down on abuses in the purchases of supplementary materials, DECS has banned schools from buying supplementary and reference materials until the year 2000. It is reviewing the list of supplementary materials to discard titles that do not meet DECS standards and adjust prices of certain materials to remove overpricing. At present, a total of 1,248 titles appear on the list.

Some titles were never submitted for evaluation but were ordered included in the list by Gloria. The authors were mostly former DECS officials, including secretaries Isidro Carino and Onofre D. Corpuz, undersecretary Alejandro Clemente and assistant secretary Ulpiano Sarmiento. Gloria made the exception, saying they were eminent persons, according to a DECS employee.

Valdes acknowledged that the ban on supplementary materials would apply only to money that comes from DECS and not money from the local school board fund. "We don't have control over them (local school boards)," he said.

He also said that it would be difficult to determine to what extent the new anti-corruption measures regarding textbook purchases will work. But he added he would like the new system to be judged by how effectively money has been used for purchases. Said Valdes: "If you have maximized its (money) use, gotten the number of books you can buy, then you can safely conclude that you have minimized cheating."