Investigating the price of textbooks "beyond the means of workers"

On the morning of June 30, the Ministry of Public Security held a press conference to announce the situation and results of public security work in the first six months of 2023.

At the press conference, Major General Nguyen Van Thanh - Deputy Director of the Department of Investigation Police on Corruption, Economic Crimes, and Smuggling (C03, Ministry of Public Security) - said that the issue of textbook prices and fake textbooks has caused outrage and many conflicting opinions in society for many years. In response to this issue, the Ministry of Public Security has assigned C03 to investigate.

After starting the investigation, C03 proactively fought against violations in pirated textbooks, book prices, and group interests related to book distribution.

By February 2023, C03 had prosecuted the case of violating bidding regulations causing serious consequences, and prosecuted Nguyen Duc Thai - former Chairman of the Board of Members of Vietnam Education Publishing House, and his accomplices.

"After the prosecution, we received the conclusion of the inspector. We also prosecuted violations related to the price stage. The publication of the book series, including reference materials, is also being further investigated.

We focus on clarifying the issue of current textbook prices, which according to public opinion are higher than workers' ability to pay," Major General Thanh stated.

Previously, the Government Inspectorate announced the results of an inspection of textbooks. Accordingly, from 2014 to the end of August 2019, 73/193 textbooks that students can write in were printed, published and sold more than 303 million copies.

In the case of calculating 65% of the price of textbooks, there are pages that students can write on but cannot be reused, causing waste for students' families and society, the estimated amount is more than 2,374 billion VND.

The inspection agency also pointed out that the Ministry of Education and Training issued a document on exercise books compiled by the publisher, confusing students and parents that exercise books compiled by the publisher are also mandatory documents to buy.

This leads to the fact that most families, when buying textbooks, buy accompanying workbooks published by the publisher.

The Government Inspectorate concluded that the publisher's determination of production needs was not realistic, resulting in a large amount of inventory, mainly printing paper, increasing interest costs, leading to a decrease in capital efficiency.

The publisher's selection of textbook printing contractors is also not in accordance with regulations. The publisher uses low-quality printing paper, lower than the national standard paper weight for printing regular books.

Before 2014 and during the period 2014 - 2019, the publisher only collected quotes from a few printing paper suppliers.

Notably, Phung Vinh Hung Paper Joint Stock Company was selected to supply 83.1% of the publisher's paper quantity, equivalent to more than VND 1,890 billion.

A probability check of a printing paper contract shows that the price of paper this company sells to publishers is on average about 1.7 times higher than the price of paper this company imports directly, corresponding to a difference of more than 210 billion VND.

According to Tuoi Tre