Why spend money on email accounts?

By Stephen Ng

While the country's coffer is dry and Malaysians 
from all walks of life have come forward to donate 
money toward the Tabung Harapan, it appears 
to be business-as-usual at the Ministry of Education.

In a letter addressed to various education institutions 
within the State of Kedah, teachers have been urged to 
use their email accounts under the MyGovUC for 

their official correspondence.

It is believed that this involves the schools and 
other education institutions in the whole country, 
although documents cited were written by the Kedah 

State Education Department.

For each email account, the government has to 
pay RM15.65 a month, which works out to be approximately 
RM841,000 for some 96,061 accounts that are registered 
under MyGovUC throughout the country. In a year, it works 
out to be RM10 million. This money could have been used 
to pay the country's debts.

According to teachers who are operating the official
email account, the service is not user-friendly. "The space
given is too small," she said. "And we have been 

asking our district education office (PPD) to delete
our previous emails to save some space; otherwise,
the new emails cannot get through our email account."

The whistleblower argued that it is free to register
an email account with either Yahoo or Google,
and the space given is very much bigger compared to
MyGovUC.

"Why the need to waste money for MyGovUC?" she asked.

She added that most schools hesitate to use the
MyGovUC account because the passwords cannot
be reset. "Therefore, anyone can easily hack into our 

accounts," she said.

This is something that the Minister of Education,
Maszlee Malik should address immediately.
There is no excuse to say that he would not
intervene when there is leakage in the organisation.