In Chubut Educational Monetary Incentives for Teachers Are Given To the Administrative Staff
<p style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><span style="line-height: 1.6em;">According to the Court of Auditors of the province, there were agents who received the benefit even though they should be considered public employees. Therefore, the Federal Government held over $126 million of the teacher’s of Chubut fund. The SIGEN adds that the local Department of Education did not issue rules establishing how the program had to run.</span></p> <div> </div>
A report by the Court of Auditors of Chubut notes that in the first half of 2008 there were administrative staff and technicians who received money from the teacher incentive fund (FONID) although they should be considered public province employees.
According to the agency, they were also paying and liquidating amounts from the FONID to teachers providing services within the education system, "no matter what tasks they actually performed."
The national teacher incentive fund was created by Law 25,053 of 1998 to improve the income of teachers who, despite the redundancy, meet "the teaching functions effectively."
However, the Court reviewed the work of 386 officers on official business and found that 262, 68% of the sample did not meet teaching duties "with children" and that "most FONID were liquidated." It was also found that several teachers that did similar tasks perceived the incentive as well as some administrative staff in the Chubut schools.
Even though the website of the Court of Auditors of Chubut has not yet published their reports, the work on the FONID settlement was part of the Federal Network Control and it was – monitored- as well as published by the General Office of the Comptroller (SIGEN, for its acronym in Spanish).
This watchdog, noted that the Ministry of Education of Chubut "did not issue rules for the implementation and execution of the Teacher Incentive Fund", i.e., it did not generate its own regulations for the smooth functioning of the program. Thus, by "ignorance of some executives, there is no uniformity in the administrative processes" within the different audited schools.
Also in the report, "there isn’t an office that monitors, collects, and maintains updated documentation" related to settlement of FONID. The records of the teachers are not centralized: these papers are in the schools, or "scattered in the respective areas." The Court examined 203 files and found that 31% of the samples, 64 cases are "flawed in several ways.”
With this background, the Federal Government decided to retain FONID amounts that were intended to go to Chubut. It was 1.30% in January-May 2008 and 1.40% for June of that year. In the first half of last year, the province was supposed to receive $ 9,604,268.86. But, without the retained amounts, $126,415.16, finally Chubut was transferred $9,477,853.70. "This is because the Government believes that the province incorporated into (their) database persons to whom the benefit should not include.”