Minister of Education Wu Se-hwa (吳思華) yesterday admitted there were lapses in the system the ministry uses to monitor the finances of educational foundations constituted as legal persons, saying there is no mechanism in place to verify possible collusion between the foundations and their donors to prevent misappropriation of funds.
Wu made the remarks during a meeting of the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee in response to Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Huang Kuo-shu’s (黃國書) questions about a tax evasion case involving more than 250 professors and doctors.
The Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday granted probation to 225 suspects — doctors and medical school professors — who pleaded guilty to tax evasion, while indicting 26 who denied the allegations.
Photo: Lin Cheng-kung, Taipei Times
When Huang asked Wu whether Springsoft Education Foundation was a legal person registered with the ministry, Wu said: “Yes.”
The foundation was founded by former National Defense Medical Center director Tsai Tso-yung (蔡作雍) and used by Tsai to help the suspects evade taxes by making forged donations in exchange for research funds, Huang said.
Huang then cited the enforcement rules on the ministry’s duties to review the application process concerning the establishment of education foundations and to monitor their operations, which stipulate that the ministry is obligated to check the finances of education foundations during appraisals.
When asked whether the ministry regularly inspected the Springsoft Education Foundation, Wu said the foundation was last checked in 2011 and no irregularities were found in its finances based on the balance sheets it submitted.
“Donations were not the problem and neither was the application for research funds. The problem is that the donors were also the beneficiaries… This was not shown in past documents,” Wu said.
Wu said the ministry would improve the system to monitor educational foundations and launch a probe into foundations that have been accused of similar malpractice, adding that the ministry would need to upgrade its information technology to ascertain the relationship between the foundations and their benefactors.
He said the ministry would obtain a better understanding of the tax evasion case and punish Springsoft employees involved in no more than two months.
Meanwhile, Wu yesterday was adamant about a merger espoused by the ministry between Tainan National University of the Arts (TNNUA) and National Cheng Kung University (NCKU).
The proposed merger has angered many TNNUA students, who protested in front of the ministry on Monday, saying the move could hamper their studies.
Wu said the TNNUA has fared poorly in university appraisals in recent years and that it is encountering difficulty recruiting students.
“If the two schools do not merge, where is the future of TNNUA?” he asked, adding that it would benefit the TNNUA if the two schools merge.
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
ALLEGED SABOTAGE: The damage inflicted by the vessel did not affect connection, as data were immediately rerouted to other cables, Chunghwa Telecom said Taiwan suspects that a Chinese-owned cargo vessel damaged an undersea cable near its northeastern coast on Friday, in an alleged act of sabotage that highlights the vulnerabilities of Taipei’s offshore communications infrastructure. The ship is owned by a Hong Kong-registered company whose director is Chinese, the Financial Times reported on Sunday. An unidentified Taiwanese official cited in the report described the case as sabotage. The incident followed another Chinese vessel’s suspected involvement in the breakages of data cables in the Baltic Sea in November last year. While fishing trawlers are known to sometimes damage such equipment, nation states have also
RSS