The Manila Economic and Cultural Office on Sunday called on concerned government agencies to go after a Manila-based recruitment firm that allegedly collected fees from young students bound for Taiwan.

MECO chairperson Silvestre Bello III has urged the Department of Migrant Workers to blacklist JS Contractor, a recruitment agency in Intramuros, for illegal collection of fees from Filipino students under Taiwan's scholarship program.

According to Bello, JS Contractor allegedly collected P45,000 each from 32 students who arrived in Taipei last 2 November under a scholarship program in one of Taiwan's leading universities.

The amount was supposed to cover airfare, visa, pre-departure orientation seminar or PDOS, and overseas employment certificate.

"Aside from being too excessive, the collection of OEC and PDOS fees is patently illegal," Bello said.

"This agency must be punished for its nefarious activities. It has to be prevented from further victimizing hapless young people whose families are seeing fresh hopes with their inclusion in the scholarship program," the MECO chief added.

A one-way plane ticket to Taipei is P10,000, and the processing fee for a student visa costs only about P2,400.

Only departing Filipino workers for deployment overseas are required to secure OEC from the DMW and go through PDOS for a fee.

Under the Taiwan Ministry of Education' guidelines, a university or college cannot accept scholars deployed through recruitment agencies.

The scholarship is a work-study program for Filipino students under Taiwan's Academe-Industry Collaboration Program of the New Southbound Policy and the recruitment of students is through a joint partnership with the Congregation of Missionary Sisters of Saint Charles Borromeo-Scalabrinians that approached different dioceses in the Philippines.

Selected universities arrange for internships with industrial/ semiconductor companies located at the Science and Industrial Park where the students are also provided with the opportunity for immediate employment after graduation.

The field of study is Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering major in Management, a three-year baccalaureate in-school program specially designed to integrate study and internship in eight semesters.

For the first year, students study full-time on-campus with free Mandarin lessons. In the second year, the internship training off-campus starts. In the third year, students stay full-time on campus. In the fourth year, students do internship training off-campus.

So far, there are 201 recipients of the study-work program which started in 2019.

The program already produced two batches of Filipino engineers this year with a big majority of them having secured jobs in Taiwan, while a few had returned to the Philippines to establish their own businesses and some pursuing higher studies.